"a vague disclaimer is nobody's friend"
4x07 The Initiative
Y'all this is a piece of history right here. Every single time you see a reference to a "shovel talk" in fic, defined here as "someone threatening harm to a potential romantic partner of a friend/loved one," it's referencing this scene. This scene specifically. Everywhere else that is not fannish internet, that interaction is referred to a "shotgun talk," referencing the father threatening a daughter's boyfriend with a shotgun. This scene gave a lot of people a chance to reframe that interaction in terms of a protective friend rather than a possessive father, which for a lot of obvious reasons resonated with people a whole fucking lot, and it immediately spread like wildfire into fannish and then general internet lexicon. I've seen people try and backronym it into an extension of the shotgun talk, as in, "I've got a shotgun and a shovel to bury you with," but I've asked a lot of rednecks from a lot of different necks of the woods and no one has ever encountered that variant in brickspace life. It's all Buffy, babey. This shit is linguistic history in the making.
