Why Do We Call Dibs and Shotgun, and Who Was the Real McCoy?

Some idioms have a fairly clear origin, but others have been lost to time and legend. Learn about the game that inspired calling dibs, the media that created calling shotgun, and why the 'real' McCoy was probably a number of people -- all in today's episode of BrainStuff, based on these articles: https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/famous-inventors/why-do-people-call-things-the-real-mccoy.htm; https://people.howstuffworks.com/what-are-dibs-and-why-do-call-them.htm; https://people.howstuffworks.com/riding-shotgun-phrase.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to BrainStuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, BrainStuff. Lauren
Vogelbaum here. The English language is full of phrases that
we casually throw into conversations, often without any idea of
what they really mean or how they originated. For example,
have you ever called dibs or called shotgun? What's a dib?

(00:26):
Are there going to be weapons involved on this grocery run?
We'll get to those in a minute, but here's another one.
Have you ever heard something or someone called the real McCoy?
We use this phrase when referring to something that's the
real deal, the genuine article. But just who was the
real McCoy? This is a case where no one is

(00:47):
actually sure how the phrase originated. There are a few
stories told here in North America about the probable McCoy
in question. The first has to do with an American
middleweight boxer and actor from the turn of the 1900s.
His given name was Norman Selby, but he performed under
the name Kid McCoy and was fairly famous in his day.

(01:09):
The almost certainly apocryphal story goes that Selby was challenged
in a bar by a man who had had a
bit too much and questioned whether he was really the
legendary fighter he claimed to be. In response, Selby socked him,
and when the man clambered back to his feet, he
announced that he was convinced that this was, indeed, the

(01:30):
real McCoy. Another tale goes that sportswriters gave Selby the
moniker because he was accused of throwing so many fights
that they never knew which version of Selby, the earnest
fighter or the fight thrower, would show up at a match.
The second branch of stories concerns a Canadian-American inventor by
the name of Elijah McCoy. McCoy was a black man,

(01:52):
the son of enslaved parents who had liberated themselves through
the Underground Railroad, who had a serious mind for engineering
and would patent over 50 innovations in his lifetime. One
of those, in 1872, was for an automated oil cup
for steam engine locomotives. It was a big deal because
it kept the train's axles and bearings lubricated while it

(02:14):
was in motion. meaning trains didn't need to stop for
service so often, meaning they could operate more quickly and safely.
So the story here goes that the success of his
invention spawned imitations, but savvy railroad inspectors and or engineers
knew that McCoy's model was the best, and thus would

(02:35):
ask for the real McCoy. The third branch of stories
comes from the Prohibition era from 1920s America. Legend has
it that a Florida rum runner named Bill McCoy was
known for selling the good stuff, that he didn't water
down or otherwise adulterate his booze to inflate his profits.

(02:55):
So when his customers wanted the best rum, they may
have requested it by name. These are all great stories,
but one of the problems with all of them is
that the phrase Real McCoy existed as such by 1881,
predating all but the Elijah McCoy story by at least
a decade. Kid McCoy would have been nine years old then,

(03:16):
and not yet getting into famous boxing matches in bars
or otherwise. And even Elijah's story can't be the true origin, either,
because it's predated by a Scottish spelling of the phrase,
the real McKay, by 40 years. The first known example
of this phrase is from 1848, from a Scottish travel guide.

(03:39):
And there are tales about where it comes from, too.
A few possible contenders include a Scottish actor, bandit, or
clan chief, all of whom shared the name Mackay. We
may never know who the real McCoy, or Mackay, was.
There's a chance that a number of real ones all
helped popularize the phrase. We've got a slightly better idea

(04:03):
of how calling dibs came to be. If you're unfamiliar
with this phrase, it's popular slang in the U.S., especially
among kids, used to refer to a claim over or
first right to some object or privilege. The social rule
is that you have to literally utter the term dibs
or I call dibs in order to stake that claim.

(04:25):
For fans of How I Met Your Mother, Barney was
almost certainly not correct when he related the tale of
Sir Walter Dibs, who coined the term in 1652 while
adrift at sea on the SS Dibs. Rather, the phrase
call dibs came into existence in the United States in
the early 1900s, but does root from much earlier, in

(04:45):
England in the 1690s at least. No less than John Locke,
the philosopher and physician, wrote about kids playing a game
called dibstones. This was a game like marbles or jacks,
originally played with the knuckle bones of sheep or with pebbles.
Each bone or stone was a dib. the connection between

(05:05):
the game and the modern-day presentation of dibs is unclear.
One hypothesis points to the word dubs, short for double,
which a player of marbles might call if they knock
two marbles outside of the game ring and thus lay
claim to both. Also, by the mid-1800s in America, the
word dib could refer to a small sum of money

(05:27):
or a portion of an item. From this definition of
a dib as a share of something— The term might
have expanded over time to the 20th century usage of
dibs as a kind of informal claim. But what about
calling shotgun? This is a specific type of dib you
call in some North American cultures when you're claiming the

(05:49):
front passenger seat in a car, also called the shotgun seat.
This phrase's origins are also pretty clear, though not quite
as old as you might think. Okay. The American stagecoach
era began in the early 1700s and lasted nearly 200 years.
Before railways took over the job of public transportation, people

(06:13):
largely traveled overland in stagecoaches. In the East and South,
they'd go along established routes dotted with inns and taverns,
making passenger travel relatively easy. In the less colonized West, however,
it was a different story. The roads weren't as dependable,
there were fewer support services, and attacks from outlaws or

(06:34):
wild animals were more impossible. To protect passengers and drivers,
the coach line sometimes stationed an armed guard next to
the driver, especially if a stagecoach was also transporting valuables
like silver bullion. The guard's preferred weapon may well have
been a shotgun, which scatters pellets, making it relatively easy

(06:55):
to hit your target at close range. The term ride
shotgun was derived from this practice, though there's no evidence
it was actually used during the stagecoach era. The first
print reference to the phrase comes from Wild West literature
from a few decades after the fact in 1912. But

(07:16):
the Western genre soon latched onto the term, popularizing it
during the next few decades when pulp fiction, movies, and
eventually television about the Old West were all the rage.
The 1939 film Stagecoach, starring John Wayne, featured the local
marshal talking about riding shotgun. The phrase shotgun seat shows

(07:37):
up in Western literature as early as 1940. There's even
a 1954 flick titled Riding Shotgun that starred Randolph Scott
as a stagecoach guard. From there, the phrase seeped into
American popular culture in general, and car culture in particular,
in the 1960s. It can be heard in George Lucas'

(07:57):
quintessential teenage car culture film American Graffiti, released in 1973.
And the phrase is still used today to indicate the
front passenger car seat, which can be claimed, usually by
kids or teens, by saying, shotgun. There are rules of
etiquette for calling shotgun. Some passengers, like a best friend

(08:18):
or romantic partner, might have permanent dibs. Sometimes the vehicle
must be in sight of the group before shotgun is called.
Of course, language is always evolving. We know even less
about what we'll all be saying in the future than
why we started saying things in the past. Today's episode

(08:41):
is based on the articles, Why Do People Call Things
the Real McCoy? by Stephanie Watson, What Are Dibs and
Why Do We Call Them? by Terry Yardlegata, And the
phrase riding shotgun came way after the West was won
by Melanie Radziki-McManus, all on HowStuffWorks.com. BrainStuff is a production
of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks.com and is produced by

(09:03):
Tyler Klang. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.