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thats a stagecoach thing, right?
Yeah it was bench seating so one guy had the reins and the other had a shotgun. Hence the name.
its interesting the slang that persists…
“i call getting to shoot people!”
I mean, it’s still America.
I guess the location of the shooting has changed though. It should mean having your desk at the front of the classroom by the teacher’s desk now.
The amount of naval terminology that has stuck around in English is mind boggling.
Ahoj! I’m Czech. We don’t even have any access to sea…
No direct access, but “jump into the Elbe and wait” is still a valid strategy…
… And hope no German bridge crushes on you!
The modern version would be “I call running the Spotify!”
And other shit.
Gringo explaining a horse carriage: Imagine a gun
And the kids have been shouting shotgun from then on.
oh I thought it was from the moonshine age, I guess horse buggies make more sense lol
Whenever someone says “Shotgun” I can only think of the drive-by scene in Boyz 'n Da Hood.
In the time of horse drawn carriages, wouldn’t the rifle be a more common weapon?
Easier to aim a shotgun went bouncing around on the stagecoach, running from bandits.
The apocryphal story is actually kind of interesting.
Roads and right of way established during the pre-firearm era were that you’d ride on the left, with people going the opposite way on your right. This was so you could use your dominant hand (usually your right) to use a sword to defend yourself.
Roads after firearms were available often established right of way with riding on the right, with oncoming traffic on the left. This is because when you shoulder a firearm on your right shoulder it’s easier to aim left.
Stagecoach drivers would sit in the left seat, with the extra person sitting on the right, holding a shotgun, hence the colloquial term for the front passenger seat.
I have no idea how true this is, but it makes for an interesting story.
In Europe it was because of Napoleon. In the US is was because of how wagons were made, according to this article:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/02/business/why-americans-drive-on-the-right-and-the-british-on-the-left
I’d been told it was a gangster thing: passenger seat shoots out the window for a drive-by.
I thought it was a US police thing, because the passenger seat is where the shotgun is commonly holstered.
That makes a bit more sense if true. I don’t easily picture 1920s gangsters wielding shotguns for a drive-by.
The correct answer afaik is stagecoach, but tbf Clyde Barrow did use cut down Browning A5s in robberies. While I don’t have any information on whether or not they were fired from a moving vehicle, it could have happened.
Every American police car I’ve seen has the gun rack in the trunk.
. Modern cop cars may be different.
Not many countries had to arm the person next to the coach driver to fight off natives defending their country against foreign invaders.
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No, no, no, this is all wrong. When we discuss immigration and the current situation in the US all Americans are European immigrants.
When we talk about the genocide of the natives Americans, it was done by Americans, Europeans had nothing to do with it.
;-)
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I’m the times coaches like that became common it wasn’t really safe to travel in most parts of the world.
Weren’t these coaches a thing in the 19th century US, from which time the term comes? From what i could find quickly, Highway robbery became less of a thing in the UK and mainland Europe by the end of the 18th century.
No, but many needed to protect those passengers from bandits and other assorted outlaws.
Fun fact: Joseph Stalin first became known to Lenin when he organized the successful robbery of a bank stagecoach in Russia. The stagecoaches were heavily protected by armed men riding on the outside of the coach as well as riding horses alongside, but Stalin observed that they tended to relax their guard upon reaching a densely-populated city, on the assumption that revolutionaries would not be willing to injure or kill innocent bystanders.
This assumption was very wrong in Stalin’s case. He had his people lob satchel bombs at the coach and riders after they reached the city, killing most of the guards as well as nearly 100 innocent bystanders in the vicinity. They made off with a huge amount of money, and Lenin congratulated Stalin although he had only planned the operation and not participated in it. The importance of delegation!
Huh, who knew that violent bank robbers who indiscriminately kill bystanders would
do a bunch of genocide after their violent takeover complete with secret police and gulagsI mean create the best goverbmont in history, praise USSR or something.Look, stalin did a lot of things wrong, but robbing banks is pretty cool even with collateral damage.
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money where your mouth is
I’m actually unbanked!
innocent
Totally. Killing innocent people isnt morally sound.
at a bank
So you mean coerced into complicity?
absolutely morally uncomplicated and good to simple binary morality
That is what cool means, yes. Learn to cope with complexity before getting pissy. If you’re going to get precious about innocent dead, maybe talk more about cops and oligarchs.
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Bonus fun fact: part of the reason for their success might be that one of the local police informants was … Stalin.
I’m starting to think this Stalin guy has some red flags.
There was once a theory that the reason for the difference in which side a vehicle is driving on the road today, stems from whether a country had many stretches of untamed wilderness with lots of bandits. So if there was a high likelihood that whoever you met on the road was a danger, the horsecart driver preferred passing them on the side of their sword arm (right hand as default), while if you did not have to take that into account, you would pass them on the left hand side.
The theory has now largely been abandonded as spurious, but it does remain a fact that there were dangerous stretches of roads in older times in Europe as well.
This obe didn’t either. Staying home was usually an option.
That’s not what it was for. They fired a shotgun before turning onto a road. If two wagons came head to head on a crappy old western road it could cause hours of delay because the horses would have to be hitched to the back of one of the wagons a pull it all the way back to the crossroad.
What an interesting creative writing exercise
Now I’d like to know why in France it’s la place du Mort, the seat of the dead…
Because they didn’t have a shotgun.
La place du mort, c’est pas le siège du milieu a l’arrière ?
Ben j’ai toujours pensé que c’est la place du passager.
Ça dépend peut-être de la région.
Chocolatine pain au chocolat hein ^^
you know, it just never comes up. mostly because i’m over 190cm so there’s no question of where i get to sit when not driving…
My kids say “Chewbacca!”
NL here. “Shotgun” is a concept, though mostly through Pop Culture Osmosis.
hi northernlion i love your videos
Years ago I read “shotgun wedding” and thought it was common to see a guy having to marry a girl he fucked while her father was there at the side with a rifle.
Capaz son asi andá a saber…
It means “quick marriage because the bride is pregnant” and that is 100% the origin of the phrase.
Particularly in poorer, rural parts of the USA having a child out of wedlock was incredibly shameful, and the financial burden of a single motherhood was intolerable. So the bride’s family would ensure the man responsible married their daughter … regardless of how he felt about it. Sometimes that meant having a shotgun at the wedding to ensure he didn’t run off.
After thw wedding is done the father goes “And kid you’d be no smoking anymore get me? I don’t wanna hear you went to buy a pack or whatever…”
I don’t get it
I’ll try and explain, but let me know if you don’t follow. In the US it’s common to claim the front passenger seat by saying “I call shotgun!” or simply “Shotgun!” The commenter is playing on a now common refrain where Americans use firearms and terminology to describe basic things. As far as I can tell, it’s true. For example: caulk gun, staple gun, nail gun, glue gun, tattoo gun, finger guns, ot phrases like “I’ll think about it before I pull the trigger on it.” Or “Shoot me your email and I’ll get you those photos.”
I don’t know how prolific this type of thing is in other countries though, so I can only assume we Americans arr outliers due to how deeply ingrained guns are in our culture. Hope this clarifies things a bit, let me know if not.
TLDR: Americans describing so many things: “So imagine a gun, but…”
All the things you listed either shoot projectiles and/or have triggers. What else do you call trigger operated projectile launchers? Also Caulk guns legitimately look like old timey machine guns.
This is my perspective as an American looking in. In other languages there may be terminology used for these items that do not reference firearms.
I am curious if there is a language that calls a nail gun not a gun
Cloueuse pneumatique
Or pneumatic nailer
I don’t think any of those things are referred to as a gun in French. Just essentially “stapler”, “nailer”, “gluer”, ect
I might be biased by the question but I spontaneously thought of “pistolet à clous” as the most common term (which indeed translates to nail gun).
I agree with your other examples though, saying “staple gun” would be weird in french
Amazon and their copycats seem to be calling them ‘nailers’, probably because it’s easier to filter out the constructive guns from destructive, prohibited ones. But Amazon is evil so it’s probably unrelated
To be fair on this one, based on actual functionality ‘air nailer’ or ‘power hammer’ is more accurate than ‘nail gun’’ anyway. Outside of movies, you can’t use it as a gun without enough modification that it’s no longer the same tool.
I like < method of creating force > + hammer above nail gun but to your second point. Nail guns can be deadly without modification. Just close up work. They sell these and others like them at big box stores. This would be, in my favored naming convention, a gunpowder hammer.
Tell that to my .22 Ramset.
Replacing “gun” with “press” for example.
Alternatively, caulker, stapler, nailer, gluer, tattooer, and finger pointers. Fingers also usually don’t launch projectiles I think. It’s just that gun culture is so embedded in your brain you couldn’t think of an alternative.
Note how these are all construction tools, and construction is also usually worked by men there. Yet more traditionally feminine tools don’t get the “gun” additive; most will say spray bottle for example rather than spray gun, even though it also has a trigger (a literal gun-like one in some cases) and shoots out a projectile.
I think press works for Caulk and glue. Stapler is used already for the machine that sits on a desk as opposed to the hand held construction style. Finger pointers is certainly descriptive but when people do “finger guns” the thumb usually mimics the hammer action. What else are they miming? Am I so inundated with gun culture I was unable to think of another use for the thumb?
I think bottles were around before firearms but Staple, nail and Caulk guns were not.
They’re both staplers - one’s just manual and the other isn’t.
Spray bottles did not exist before guns, no.
They both put staples into things but they aren’t really interchangeable functionally. It makes sense to distinguish them depending on the context.
Kartuschenpresse aka cartridge press
Cool thx
Bullseye.
First bit is true enough, but we call “shotgun” because that was the guy holding the coach gun for bandit defense. Wish I had a pic of mine, but they’re basically a short double-barreled shotgun for warding off robbers and Indians. Coach guns are quickly and easily aimed, powerful at short range, “get the fuck off of me” guns.
The Wild West wasn’t as wild as movies make it out, but you were on your fucking own. LOL, no 911. While you’re driving the coach, best have a man whose job is looking around and blasting raiders.
tl;dr: Calling shotgun means you’re taking the front passenger side in a (historically) defensive role.
Yes, thats part of the why but it’s still odd culturally from the perspective of the rest of the world especially since what you’re describing occurred 100+ years ago and the terminology has likely only persisted because of the US’ gun obsession.
only persisted because
That is a wild stretch of imagination. Loads of things we say, across all countries and languages, persist for centuries after losing their original meanings.
Sure but in this case there are numerous gun related phrases that have persisted in American culture because of this particular affinity.
I like the way you explained this.
arr
Pirate detected.
Hoist the flag high!
They’re saying, no, it’s not common for other cultures to call it a gun thing. But in a humorous way, by drawing attention to the absurdity of the question.
The Yankee explaining riding in the passenger seat : imagine a gun
EDIT : I’m literally translating the spanish to english.
EDIT2 : Which I didn’t see in the post originally
It’s still relevant. I always hand my passengers a pistol before disembarking.
Shotgun is an America thing, coming from the stagecoach era. The shotgun in question has a shortened barrel for reduced storage footprint.
The BMW R12 has a sidecar mounted with an MG 42 light machine gun. But no-one calls sidecar gunner
That is purely an American thing.
Not saying my family had someone in the passenger seat with a shotgun to protect their batch of white lightning…also not saying they didn’t.
Nope. Canada had stagecoach and shotguns too. So did Mexico. The Sundance Kid owned a bar in Calgary at one point, and worked out at the Bar U ranch near Calgary before that.
n’t.
In Australia: yes and it’s commonplace. But like 70% of our media is American so unsurprising.
You’re basically americans with going outside instead of corn.
That’s like an amazing American showerthought, I never even considered it
Well, for my world it’s interesting because the passenger seat is just that. But before the evolution of tech and everything else heavily affected travel, the front passenger seat held importance in that the one who sits there can assist in reading a map, adjusting the passenger wing mirror, monitoring the side directly while parking or other tight manoeuvres, emotional support for police stops, handling a drink so the driver can hydrate without endangering anyone, an extra pair of eyes on the less vital areas etc… Now these benefits of a primary passenger are almost nonexistent, as better driver-side controls, digital maps, GPS and TTS, and stricter road safety laws (banning consumption while driving) reduce the need for an assistant driver.
wait, it’s illegal to drink anything while driving in places? when did that happen?
In some place that counts as distracted driving and you can get fined for it.
This phrase has confused me so much when I heard it in one of Taylor Swift’s songs.
Then my Texan cousins explained it to me on a visit one day. I was still confused. Now I’ve found out it’s a stage coach thing. Interesting.
