Learning English with TV-Shows #14: to ride shotgun
aus: How I met your mother S03E15 – The Chain of Screaming
Narrator: So I decided to purchase something I knew would be the envy of all my friends.
Ted: A new car!
Barney: Ted, this is New York City- you’re never gonna drive it. This is a really, really stupid purchase, and I’m sorry, but none of us can support it. Shotgun for eternity!
Robin: You can’t call shotgun for eternity.
Barney: I just called it.
Robin: You can’t just call things, Barney.
Barney: I call that I can call things!
to ride shotgun – Beifahrer sein (Erklärung auch hier bei das-englisch-forum.de)
Weitere Begriffe
purchase – Anschaffung
envy – Neid
to call sth. – etwas fordern, für sich beanspruchen
auch: to call dibs on sth. – etwas für sich beanspruchen (Beispielsatz: “I got dibs on that last piece of pizza” Quelle: urbandictionary.com)
Auszug Wikipedia:
The first known reference to “riding shotgun” in print occurred in Western pulp fiction in the March 27, 1921 issue of the Washington Post’s “Magazine of Fiction,” in a story entitled “The Fighting Fool” by Dane Coolidge. It was used to refer to riding as an armed guard in the front of a stagecoach, next to the driver (this would usually have been on the left, as stage drivers traditionally sat on the right, near the brake). Historians have been unable to find a use of the term “riding shotgun” in the actual time of the Old West, when the terminology actually used was riding as “shotgun messenger.” The use of the phrase in print to refer to automobiles occurred in 1954 simultaneously with the TV series Gunsmoke, which became extremely popular, and used the terminology of riding shotgun nearly weekly.
Claiming dibs on the front seat of a car is called “Calling shotgun” although shotgun can be used in the same way as “bagsy” in the United Kingdom. Dibs is not binding if the object being claimed is currently in someone’s possession.
