I was reading up on the aborted OICW rifle the army was looking at (and throwing buzzwords at) in the 90s.
Forgotten Weapons sent me there.
I noticed this:
I think that's an army document. They have labelled the two magazines, 'clips.' Do that today and everyone blows a gasket. So here I am, blowing a gasket. Well, there is leakage around my gasket, I'm too mellow to go all catastrophic failure over this.
Some pencil pushing egghead did that labeling? Some PR Army guy with a head full of Synergy and somehow was sick the day they went to the range at Basic where a drill instructor would have set him straight permanent? They just didn't get wrapped around the axle over it all of 15 years ago? Who knows... I just thought it interesting.
If they had only gotten that part right they would have deployed that weapon...
KIDDING!
7 comments:
This is a peeve of mine.
I don't mean calling a round or cartridge a "bullet", or a magazine a "clip". I mean people who stumble all over themselves to sternly correct someone when they get a term wrong. You'd think they'd just witnessed a kitten killing or something.
I try to use correct terminology myself. If I'm teaching someone about firearms I try to make sure they know the correct name and function of everything we talk about. But I don't have a stroke if someone calls a decocker a "safety". I just try to make sure they know the difference.
That's not an "Army" document, although that picture may well have been used IN a press release or PowerPoint put out by the Program Office.
Most of those people are civilians, and a high percentage are contractors. Often times, desperate for good imagery for a particular dog & pony show, we'll lift stuff from Google Image searches. *
That particular picture of OICW was in a news magazine (Newsweek, I believe), labelled by the journalists. I believe the raw photo came from the manufacturer -- it's a typical sales pitch layout photo. I remember getting pissed off by clueless journalists then.
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* Of course, if my group had used this image, we'd have relabelled it to use the correct terminology. And this is the rather laid back group where I told a flag level briefing, "We can't fit anymore emitters on this platform -- if we squeeze this Twinkie any harder, the creamy filling will shoot out both ends." (Later in the same brief -- "What we have here is a failure to communicate. When USCG says 'Prosecute the target,' they mean, 'put him in handcuffs and stand him in front of a judge'. When WE say 'Prosecute the target,' we mean, 'Make a smouldering oil slick.' Thus, to the Navy, 'Disabling fire' is quite different from what USCG means -- under our ROE, a smouldering oil slick is a ship that has been 'disabled'." {LOL})
At a local gunstore this week, I saw a packaged Mossberg magazine where the packaging referred to itself as a clip.
The way an angry man in a funny hat explained it to me it that "Clips fill magazines. Magazines load pistols and rifles.
The font suggests a Popular Mechanics graphic.
I should have checked Google Books. It was in the September 1998 issue of Popular Mechanics.
You're right -- it was Popular Mechanics. I thought "Newsweek", probably because it was the "news" magazine I was most likely to read in a doctor's office. . .
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