Blunderbuss

Is there anything more recognizable from America's agrarian past then the fluted shape of a blunderbuss? Depicted in cartoons, museums, and pictures from long ago, the blunderbuss is a relic of America's long-standing obsession with firearms.

But what, precisely, does "blunderbuss" mean that somehow translates into a "short musket of wide bore and flaring muzzle" (AHD)? According to the American Heritage Dictionary, Blunderbuss is a combination of two words. First, blunder is an alteration of the Dutch donder, meaning thunder. Donder comes from Middle Dutch doner, which may come from the theoretical Indo-European root (s)tenə-, meaning "to thunder".
The second word, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is bus, meaning "gun". Bus has a more interesting etymology than donder, as it comes from the Middle Dutch word busse, meaning "tube". Likely, this came about simply because the barrel of a gun is, by necessity, a tube. Busse, in turn, comes from the Latin buxis, meaning "box". Perhaps there is a relation between a tube and a box being containers? That is a wild guess.

As donder means "thunder" and bus means "gun", it's pretty easy to see how the blunderbuss got it's name: it's a "thundergun". Since it was a muzzle-loaded weapon, this likely means that, like many of its kind, it had a loud report. Hence, the "thunder".