Riding Shotgun

John Wayne riding shotgun in Stagecoach

Have you ever "called shotgun” to claim the front seat as a passenger in a car? This seems to be an Americanism for when one of multiple passengers wants the front seat rather than being cramped with a lousy view in back.

The usage has its roots in a bygone era of the American West when stagecoaches were common. At least in the retelling of American history through films and television, we learned that back in the 1880s the seat next to the driver on top was given to someone with a gun.

Though shotguns offered the chance to hit one or more attackers more easily from a bouncing seat, we also have seen on the screen men with rifles and pistols riding shotgun. The term became a generic way of describing the seat and the duty.

The phrase appears in the 1939 John Ford film Stagecoach starring John Wayne who declares that “I’m gonna ride shotgun.”  Randolph Scott starred in a 1954 film titled Riding Shotgun.

Though we hope no one today who calls shotgun when getting into a car is carrying a weapon, the term has survived in slang usage.  In the 21st century, riding shotgun might require monitoring the GPS and answering phone calls and text messages for the driver, which are jobs that might actually save the driver's life.

Hoosiers and other demonyms

I have posted here about eponyms, words that come from the name of a person, but there are also demonyms which are words that identify residents or natives of a particular place. The word is usually derived from the name of that particular place.

Simple examples of demonyms include Chinese, American and Mexican. In English, demonyms are capitalized and often the same as the adjectival form of the place, e.g. "Italian", "Japanese", "Greek," but this is not always the case. The adjective for Spain is "Spanish", but the demonym is "Spaniard."

Some groups of people may be referred to by multiple demonyms, such as natives of the United Kingdom who can be called British people, Brits, or Britons.

We commonly use  country-level demonyms - such as "French," but also use lower-level demonyms for residents of a region, state or city.  Someone from Nevada is a Nevadan, and from New Jersey is a New Jerseyan. A resident of San Francisco is a San Franciscan.

And then we have demonyms with more unusual origins. For example, a resident of Indiana is known as a Hoosier. The etymology is disputed, but the leading theory (via the Indiana Historical Bureau and the Indiana Historical Society) says that "Hoosier" originated in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee as a term for a backwoodsman, a rough countryman, or a country bumpkin

"Hoosier" was in general use by the 1840s,and the state adopted the nickname "The Hoosier State" in the mid-1800s.

The term shows up in the names of numerous Indiana-based businesses, organizations, and as the name of the Indiana University athletic teams.

Hoosiers is also the title of a popular 1986 film about a coach and his small town Indiana high school basketball team's unlikely run to a championship.

Silhouette

A silhouette is the image of a person, animal, object or scene represented as a solid shape of a single color, usually black, with its edges matching the outline of the subject. The interior of a silhouette does not have any features or details. It is usually on a light/white background, or none at all. A silhouette is not an outline, since it appears as a solid.

Silhouette images can now be created in any visual media, but originally they were pieces of cut paper, put on a background, and then framed.

The word silhouette is an eponym, a word derived from a person's name. In this case, it was Étienne de Silhouette, a French finance minister. He was no artist, and he did not make silhouettes. In 1759, he imposed severe economic demands upon the French people, particularly the wealthy. His austerity measures made his name synonymous with anything done or made cheaply. Portraits of people made by doing inexpensive cutouts (this was pre-photography) on black cards were the cheapest way of recording a person's appearance.

The term silhouette was around since the the 18th century, but only applied to the art of portrait-making in the 19th century. The pieces were also called “profiles” or “shades.”

They could be painted on ivory, plaster, paper, card, or in reverse on glass. Ones that were “hollow-cut” meant the negative image was traced and then cut away from light colored paper which was then laid atop a dark background. The most common was "cut and paste” where the figure was cut out of dark paper (usually free-hand) and then pasted onto a light background.