to eat one's gun
- idiom
- NSFW
- After receiving yet another rejection letter, he joked, 'I might as well eat my gun!'
Examples
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The comedian said he would eat his gun if he had to sit through another boring meeting.
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When life gets overwhelming, Sarah sometimes threatens to eat her gun, though everyone knows she's exaggerating.
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After another failed job interview, he joked that he might eat his gun.
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Don't say you want to eat your gun!
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She joked about wanting to eat her gun after a bad day.
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During the meeting, he sarcastically remarked he would eat his gun if the discussion dragged on any longer.
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Feeling overwhelmed with the workload, she humorously said, 'At this rate, I might eat my gun just to escape.'
Antonyms
How Desperate
Surface Forms
Morphology
The sense 'to contemplate or express suicidal thoughts' cannot be predicted from the literal meanings of 'eat' + 'one's' + 'gun' — a B1 learner who knows the constituents would at best infer a bizarre literal image (eating a firearm), not the idiomatic suicidal-idea sense. This is a rare, informal/slang construction with a culture-specific dark-humour reading, so its meaning is not transparently derivable from the parts.
Etymology
The idiom eat one's gun gives a shocking image: someone would eat a gun because they feel very frustrated or hopeless. That wild picture became a dark joke or threat, so the phrase means 'to say or think about killing yourself' when people are extremely upset.