big shot

   An American slang term for an important person, but vocative usage tends to be ironic. In Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint the hero, as a child, is playing baseball with his father. ‘Come on, Big Shot. throw the ball,’ his father tells him, and also addresses him as ‘Big Shot Ballplayer’. Elsewhere in the novel the father says: ‘You’re riding for a fall, Mr Big. You’re fourteen years old, and believe me, you don’t know everything there is to know.’ As the conversation continues the father uses ‘Mr Big Shot’ as the fuller form of the vocative. St Urbain’s Horseman, by Mordecai Richler, has one man saying to another: ‘Whatever happened to that James Bond film you were supposed to direct? Big shot.’ Joseph Heller, in Good as Gold, has: ‘“Hey, bigshot,” his father would bellow on the telephone, and Gold would wilt at once.’ In Truman Capote’s short story Shut a Final Door a man who is described as a big shot in a newspaper article is then ironically addressed by an office colleague: ‘Whatcha say, bigshot?