I heard a rumor, probably apocryphal, that Sandra Bullock, being a Texan herself, had contributed that little piece to the movie. Considering what I have heard about her on guns, it probably is just a legend.
Liberty wrote:Bitterclinger wrote:
Nnyokaye LIberty, I appreciate all the hard work looking up stuff in online dictionaries and all, but it was just a joke. Sorry you had to go through all those contortions to straighten me out. I guess I kind-of thought it was obvious. Next time, I'll try to remember to include a funny emoticon.
Yeah, I probably over responded. Its sort of a pet peave of mine though. There are some people who can't help but correct people over the use of the words like Gun vs Rifle, Pistol vs Revolver and even clip vs magazine. It annoys me because usually they are wrong about the context. And even when they are correct in the case of Magazine vs Clip. I find the term Pistol magazine more confusing and vague than the incorrect term "pistol clip".
I used to have a pistol that took clips, not magazines. Broomhandle Mausers, among others with fixed magazines, used stripper clips to load as an alternative to feeding one round at a time through the ejection port, thus the term "pistol clip" is not incorrect. And even today it is easy to find revolvers that use clips.
These days the term gun has morphed into a generic term for firearm, but when I was a kid the terms were apparently better understood than they are today. We had several "guns" in the household, and not all of them were shotguns, and we had pistols and revolvers, and clips and magazines for both pistols and rifles.
Of course language usage changes over time, and we can expect no less of "gun" terms, even if it distresses the perfectionists in some of us. The recent debate about "assault rifles" is one good example, with the term being bandied about as if we all knew exactly what it meant. The problem is that although I know what I think it means, it means something different to you, and yet something else to our legislators, and Andy Cuomo and Dianne Feinstein think it includes everything but smooth bore muskets (and don't get me started on "ancient" terminology.)
Terms morph into our language, and out, over long periods and the result, in my own opinion, is a dumbing down of the language, heck, even the French have raised a stink about too many "American" terms creeping into their language. And around the turn of the 19th to 20th century, you didn't use the term "jazz" in polite company without risking a punch in the nose.
Misspellings creep into everyday usage, and I am guilty of it too, and misuse due to misunderstanding of terms make some peoples' language almost incomprehensible at times ("peeve" vs "peave" if you will, I have used a "Peavy", but don't know if that means I have "peaved" or not
) and the creep of twitter terms reminds this old ham and railroad nut of Phillips Code and the abbreviations necessary to save bandwidth.
One of my favorites these days is calling the device that we input numbers into our telephones with a "dial" when it obviously isn't anywhere near round, and I'll bet that most users have no idea why it is called that, or how to tell when a clock says "quarter of" or "quarter after."
I do dislike the change of the language in some cases, and I will continue to challenge the terminology of clip vs magazine and rifle vs shotgun, but we have to realize that as much as we may decry the change, because the general population fails to understand the distinctions, or worse, doesn't care, that certain terms are bound to become everyday descriptions of things they don't describe.
[/rant] <--- such as!
ETA:
"We should not write so that it is possible for the reader to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us." -Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus), rhetorician (c. 35-100)
) I pass by a table with two ladies handing out literature.
