Riding Shotgun
Choosing an American saying for this week is probably the most difficult task. American customs (and language) have been spread over the globe through media, politics, and American socio-economic power. So, it is hard to find Americanisms that are not well-known but are useful for a second language learner to learn. I decided to use the phrase, riding shotgun.
Riding shotgun means to be in the front passenger seat in a vehicle. The person riding shotgun is NOT the driver. In North America, some people yell, “shotgun!” when they are approaching a car for carpooling. They are claiming the front passenger seat. It is sort of a game. The first person to say shotgun when the vehicle is in view gets the honor of sitting in the front seat.
Example: We drove all the way to Florida with my mother riding shotgun.
Origin
The first use of ‘riding shotgun’ in literature was in The Sunset Trail (1905) by Alfred Henry Lewis: “Wyatt and Morgan Earp were in the service of the Express Company. They went often as guards – “riding shotgun,” it was called – when the stage bore unusual treasure.” In this quote, Lewis is describing the wild west.
The wild west was… wild. There were many criminals and outlaws. So, when a stagecoach (a horse drawn vehicle use to carry mail or people) delivered valuable items, they hired a weaponized guard to go with them. These were called shotgun messengers. A common weapon for shotgun messengers was a gun – called a messenger shotgun. It seems unlikely that it was called riding shotgun at the time, but the Western film genre along with other literary fiction established riding shotgun as a familiar phrase. Even though riding shotgun references events from hundreds of years ago, it only became popular in the past 100 years.
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Reference:
https://archive.org/details/sunsettrail00lewigoog
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/riding-shotgun.html
https://people.howstuffworks.com/riding-shotgun-phrase.htm
https://www.straightdope.com/21343297/what-s-the-origin-of-riding-shotgun