h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

how is shotgun wedding slang? it describes an actual wedding, with or with out a shot gun present to make the man marry a woman he has impregnated, usaully in the South. It is a forced, speedy wedding so that the child is born in wedlock.

I think you may just possibly have missed the entire point of the entry...

"Shotgun wedding" is a phrase which not everyone in the world will understand. It's hence a slang term used primarily in South USA. However, it's usage has spread since then, and it is now practically mainstream English. 'twas not always the case, though.

And...

If you stop to consider the literal meanings of the two words, there is very little meaning there at all, until you start visualizing circumstances where a shotgun and a wedding might well come together.

Take this one more step, and shotgun wedding has meaning, now, even without the shotgun or, for that matter, without the wedding. Times change. Slang grows into the language and eventually grows out again.

You same objection could be made to the slang word 'butchers.' 'Everyone' knows that butchers means a look. "How does that come to be?" I hear most of the world outside of England asking. As far as that goes, it wasn't that long ago that I could have excluded most of England outside of London. And before that, I could have left out all of London except for those living and working in or near the East End.

Butchers is from the Cockney rhyming slang, "Butcher's hook, that's a look." Drop all but the first, and least obvious, word and you have, a 'butchers.'

Barton