Have you ever "settled a score"? In early modern England, where drinking just to the point of excess without tipping the line was a point of male bonding, self-definition, and pride, "score" was a term for the collective bar tab of a group. To settle a score was to make sure each fellow could pay his fair part. If you've ever split a bill, you've settled a score--and you have also not thrown away your shot.

Drinking songs from the early 17th century let us see "shot" operating as the evening's running bar tab for a group of friends or co-workers, as in this 1609 drinking ballad mocking (or, being a drinking song, appropriated to celebrate) the crudeness and impolite behavior of young soldiers demanding that civilians toast ("pledge") them

And he that will not pledge me this

Pardona moy ie vous en pree

Payes for the shot, what euer it is

With neuer a penny of money

Here we're talking about a round for the house. But continuing to trace drinking ballads, the word in recorded use is glomming new meanings onto it. From 1627's Heres to thee kind Harry:

Each man pay the shot

What falls to his lot

And I will pay for Harry

The magnanimous singer creates a more positive and community-friendly attitude for the song. But the word shot itself is a step more insular here: it refers to one individual's running tab.

In toasting "kind Harry," our 1629 drinkers were engaging in an essential component of early modern drinking culture: pledging healths, what we would call toasting. You'd toast each other, the king, the weather, your mother-in-law...people competed for who could come up with the wittiest toasts, the smartest toasts, and presumably, who could still enunciate their words clearly enough to say a toast at the end of the night (while still having participated in each pledge, of course!) As you might imagine, this was great for tavernkeepers...not so good for civic leaders, princes, and even the Holy Roman Emperor himself, who had to deal with both the violent debauchery resulting from all those drunk people--and the fact that maybe some of those pledged healths were not really for health, as it were.

And in the legislation hoping to curtail the practice--legislation repeated again and again for the obvious reason, "shots" appear to punctuate individual toasts. In 1663, that young, scrappy and hungry colony Massachusetts even tried yet again to reign in its partiers--especially sailors, who were apparently wont to punctuate each round with a cannon shot.

If that sounds improbable, a law outlawing something that might happen or that maybe happened once or twice, consider this. When early United States of Americans celebrated July 4th--right there in Massachusetts--they did so with daytime parades for the families and nighttime drinking of "spirited toasts". Lots of toasts. And each one punctuated by a cannon shot.

Linguistic evidence, moreover, suggests that these are not isolated cases. Shot, round (...Colt .45, anyone?) our language of drinking today is our language of guns. Slang for drinking in early modern England shows just how entrenched this connection became. People in 1700 were talking about being "in the gun" as a euphemism for being drunk. And why? Because "gun" was contemporary slang for a bottle of wine.

Tracing the evolution of slang is hard, especially across multiple centuries and continents, and especially in such an oral culture as the world of taverns and drinking. Nevertheless, we can trace three evolving ideas: the shift from "shot" meaning something communal to something individual; the role of actual shots marking an individual round of drinking, and the language of "gun" to refer to an individual drink.

I'm not sure there is evidence to say "wine bottles are bigger than shots of whiskey, so of course we went from gun to shot." But I think we can show the involvement of shooting guns with the drinking of toasts to the point that gun slang fused with alcohol slang over the course of the early modern era.

Be safe on New Year's, y'all!