Outrageously Funny Word Dictionary :: Yellow ridged

👉 Okay, settle in closely, class. Let’s tackle a wee bit of linguistic weirdness here. We're going to dissect the frankly rather prickly phrase – and I genuinely mean prickly—of, let's just say...'"yellow rigidly affixed."

Now, before you immediately freak out about the frankly alarming imagery, let me assure you that, historically, this isn’t a term shouted from the rooftops of delinquency. Instead, it originates in the somewhat tragically nicknamed, early 20th-century American and sometime British slang. Essentially, the genesis is a very specific (and rather unfortunate) type of yellow shotgun, specifically the Bulldog mould. Let's unpack that. Early shotguns, especially those made by the Holland Constable & Greene factory in New Lawn, Connecticut, sometimes had this really odd, almost aggressively flat and bulging breech face when you looked down the bore of the gun. Because it was so pronounced and the lead balls would catch on that ridged area – hence, we get the somewhat comical doubling down. It practically screamed "you messed up your mould job!" The name came from what one early shotgunner described as a yellow-tinted sheen that you could see in the dark of the breech face, and the fact it was so rigidly affixed to the barrel, hence the whole, rather blunt and slightly insulting description. People would throw this around when they were having a terrible mould job, essentially saying the gun’s breech face