My Pet Peeve

[Peter Laidler]

Pet peeve............ What about a bloke who's read a few books and tells you all about the Bren gun, but more especially about just how accurate it was. And he should know, because his uncles brother who knew someone in the NAAFI in Tripoli who had an uncle who was a cook in ........ And suddenly they're there telling you all about them!

Or the other, that the Sten gun...................., well, it does everything and anything, depending where you are listening.

But I do find that the older I get, the more peeves I get and the easier it is to peeve me. Is this a common theme?

[smellie]

I rather think that Captain Laidler has struck the nail right upon its little flat head.

This points to a good reason why those of us who mess about with these things, either recreationally or professionally, MUST be Good People.

If we are not, then we will be faced with Millions of Years of being told by an endless succession of boors (not to be confused with Boers, who can be nice people) that, in my own case, the Mark III Ross was the most useless POS ever issued and the bolts always blow back and......
............... poor Captain Laidler will be sitting on the next pile of coal and listening as an endless succession of boors tell him of their Bisley successes with the Bren, house-clearing with Stens with tied-back triggers and of jungle-clearing operations with Cooey 82s in the wilds of South Viet-Nam.

MUCH better to try to be nice, grit our teeth, look to a better day and all that.

If only there were not quite so MANY!!!!!

[TDH]

And mine is those that have no clue of the difference between a clip and a magazine

[Son]

And mine is those that have no clue of the difference between a clip and a magazine

or worse still- calling a charger a clip or a charger clip!

[phil441]

Wow! You guys are tough! Ya gonna jump on a new member for misusing such terms?
Come on..... we're gonna have clueless folks signing in from time to time. You can jump their case or you can cut them some slack and "gently" educate them. They've probably got the guns you're so sensitive about and there's a chance that you don't.
Welcome them into the clan and you shall be rewarded.........

Rant over.........
My pet peeve aired.......

[Son]

Wow! You guys are tough! Ya gonna jump on a new member for misusing such terms?
Come on..... we're gonna have clueless folks signing in from time to time. You can jump their case or you can cut them some slack and "gently" educate them. They've probably got the guns you're so sensitive about and there's a chance that you don't.
Welcome them into the clan and you shall be rewarded.........

Rant over.........
My pet peeve aired.......

Well I was getting a giggle out of the thread so far.. Lighten up phil441, if you think any of the posters here would jump on newbies for these "heinous crimes", then you have missed the whole point of milsurps.com.

And I think "clueless" wouldn't be a politically correct term. Maybe you should say something like "milsurp undernourished" or "surplus challenged"... anyone got another suggestion for it?

[Patrick Chadwick]

How about "new recruits with educational potential"?
After all, they have shown enough gumption to find and join this forum!

Patrick

[paulm]

Hey Smellie see if you can Fathom this one There is a dealer in Town who pronounces Moisin instead of Mosin, insists that his way is the correct pronunciation, even when I showed him he was wrong. Now for the kicker He doesn't like Russian Rifles, and here again insists they are Junk BUUUUT He sells them Now is that love of money, or just plain
Hypocracy Last year my wife bought me the Russian Pile cap with the Red Army symbol in front I walked into the store wearing it I thought he was going to throw me out bodily

[smellie]

Hmmmmmmm...... some people!

I spell it "Moisin" myself because that is the way I learned to spell it, long time ago. The Russian language has undergone several purges of excess letters in the last century-and-a-bit and they are now getting it down to a manageable number of symbols which is something that you couldn't say a century ago. Hard part is that many of the thrown-out symbols still exist in Ukrainian and White Russian and a few other of the Slavic languages. I got into the habit of pronouncing it "Moisin" also, likely because of a most insistent Ukrainan friend who got right hot under the collar when I pronounced HIS name incorrectly. It all had to do with one of those letters that got chucked out of the Russian alphabet: I think at one time they had 5 different forms of the letter 'i'. This can be most confusing to a small mind such as mine.

Nice thing is that if you want to talk about a FINE rifle, you only need a single syllable: either "Lee" or "Ross" will do the job nicely. Two-syllable rifles tend to be of lower practicality ("Mau-ser", "Mo-sin" are good examples here) and three-syllable rifles are definitely strange, all of them ("Mann-li-cher" and Schmitt-Ru-bin" come to mind). The single saving fact which protects the two-syllable Ga-rand is that John Cantius Ga-rand was born in Ca-na-da (which has THREE syllables, likely accounting for some of our definitely-strange governments). (You will note carefully that we are avoiding use of that OTHER three-syllable word, "En-fi-eld", which is a worldwide synonym for "finest possible design"!)

But the old MN rifles, whether original 91s or 91/30s, really ARE junk, friend, but they are junk which will WORK at 50 below zero.... and there is absolutely NOTHING which can be said against THAT. That they have a strange cachet of their own kind of "Class", not to mention that they can be made frighteningly accurate, just puts them in a class all of their own.

I rather like them, but you didn't hear me say that!
.

BTW, when I was in university, a friend had one of those hats and I had a 1943 Canadian Army greatcoat with the regimental markings removed. Friend Stosho Yaskiw just HAD to borrow it for a few days, adorned it with homemade Red Army insignia and went home (to the heavily-Ukrainian Russell district) for the weekend dressed like Tovarich Kommissar. He very nearly gave his grandfather a heart attack, but his father saw the joke, thankfully. Fun!

[Peter Laidler]

Another truly pet peeve is the fact that the little side block, against the forum members name doesn't name the Country in which he's based. It's not as though 'Desperate Dan' could be identified too easily if the word CANADA or Australia or even the Isle of Wight was written in the block. It's even MORE frustrating when that ask something like, '.....where can I get a set of BA taps from.....' I mean, the world is a big place! And even MORE worse (or badder as my son would say.....) is when someone asks for something and you've got millions of them, and offer to send one....... to where? Even badder still, when the ask for values. In England it might be zilch but in Tasmania, hundreds.........

Don't get me going on this as a regular forum contributor and sender of jiffy bags! My wife says that it just gets worse (or worser.....) as you get older