shooting gallery
1
9.5
- noun
- /ˈʃuːtɪŋ ˈɡæləri/
- NSFW
:
punto de inyección
- There is the ragged teenager whose ambition is to throw off his or her Upper East Side address, the kid who takes the limo to the shooting gallery on Lexington and 125th, but truly this Upper East Side is a separate city, where only the occasional skirmish with the New York of this story takes place.
Examples
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When he told her the stories of the shooting galleries in Juarez, cruising dark downtown streets on Christmas Eve looking for enough to get through another holiday, the last time ever in his sister's bathroom, shaking and sick, she felt the vicarious thrills fleshing out her literary past.
Fiction book (1994) -
That's a shooting gallery up there.
-
The one on the corner, where we used to play handball, turned first into a karate school and then into a shooting gallery.
Fiction book (1998) -
So that even if we could imagine that one fine day the whole shooting gallery should fall to pieces and everybody who wanted could become independent, Latvia would still have a demographic problem on its hands...
Fiction book (1994) -
Where the needle had been was somewhere you yourself had been, and the trail of that needle, the trail that led to the shooting gallery, was the history of your footfalls and of the people whose lives were a part of yours.
Fiction book (1994) -
This abandoned building became a notorious shooting gallery where drug users gather to inject heroin.
-
After the community found out, the old warehouse was labeled as a dangerous shooting gallery for drug trafficking.
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The police often patrol the area around the former factory, which has turned into a shooting gallery for illicit drug use.
Synonyms
4
9.9
A place where people buy and smoke a strong illegal drug from the poppy plant
Surface Forms
Morphology
The literal constituents ('shooting' = firing a gun; 'gallery' = a place or hall) would lead a learner to think of a shooting range or exhibition space rather than a drug-injection site. The drug-related sense depends on slang/metaphorical use of 'shoot' (to inject) and an idiomatic extension of 'gallery' that B1 learners who only know the basic word meanings are unlikely to infer, so the expression is opaque.
Etymology
One popular story says shooting gallery came from shooting meaning 'to inject' and gallery meaning 'a room where people gather'. That's why it came to mean 'a place where people go to buy and inject drugs'.