gun language

We've become more involved in 1812 and French & Indian reenactments in the last couple of years, and Adam needs an appropriate gun. Since he decided to build a flintlock himself, the house abounds with books, diagrams, and gun bits, and I am learning a lot. Characteristically, mostly what I'm learning is etymology.

Did you know that the three principal parts of a flintlock are the lock, stock, and barrel? I always pictured that idiom as referring to a locked wooden barrel full of some sort of commercial stock, molasses perhaps. Come to think of it, though, I'm not sure where on a barrel one would put a lock.

On a flintlock, the barrel is, of course, the metal part through which the ball travels, while the stock is the wooden part that the shooter actually holds and braces against his body when firing.

Linguistically, the most interesting part is the lock.

Men who carried flintlocks also carried their ammunition balls rolled into small paper packets with black powder. To load, you rip the packet open and some of the powder goes into the pan while the rest goes into the barrel of the gun with the paper and the ball.

Dealing with the powder in the pan is where the language gets interesting. A flintlock fires when the flint comes forward and strikes the frizzen, dropping sparks into the pan which then ignites the powder in the barrel and sends the ball flying. If you're thinking this is a complicated mechanism, you're right, and there are a couple of ways that things can go wrong. (Really, there are probably more than a couple, but right now I'm only interested in the ones that have produced idioms.)

The first is failure to fire. I'm not sure how the spark gets from the pan into the barrel, but when whatever is supposed to happen here fails to happen, we have a flash in the pan, a dramatic but ultimately unsatisfying spark that dies quickly.

The second way things can go wrong is firing at the wrong moment. When ready to fire, the soldier or hunter uses his thumb to pull the hammer all the way back or cock it. However, in order to push the frizzen forward to put powder in the pan, he has to pull the hammer back halfway. If the flintlock goes off while in this half-cocked position, chances are the person holding it is not ready, and the ball will fly in an unexpected direction.

Until I asked Adam to explain how this new thing inhabiting our house works, I had not realized how many of these everyday expressions come from the language used to talk about guns. Expressions like these continue to be spoken today because we hear how they are used, and we learn when their use is appropriate. We don't necessarily need to know the origin of the idiom in order to use it correctly. 

However, in order for phrases like this to become idioms in the first place, a critical mass of speakers in the speech community have to share the point of reference. These phrases are evidence of a time when every house had at least one flintlock, when hunting game or slaughtering one's own animals were the way to acquire food, when life on the frontier meant that every house had to be able to defend itself. This was a time when the majority of Americans lived intimately with their guns.

The newest idioms I can think of come from our technology. We might say that someone is out of juice or fully charged, not to mention the spread of abbreviated communication like FWIW, LOL, brb. I've been trying to think of mainstream idioms that come from newer styles of firearms, and I'm drawing a blank. Our guns are not the integral part of our lives that they once were.

Picture from: Marshall, Brian. "How Flintlock Guns Work" How Stuff Works, 2002. http://www.howstuffworks.com/flintlock2.htm

Comments

  1. It comes as no surprise to me that we don't much use "modern" idioms which in some way refer to guns. We can scarcely agree on what the relevant terminology is when discussing them at all. (see any debate on guns these days)

    I hear "spray and pray" every now and again and it refers to automatic weapons with which one would fire the gun once and it would automatically continue to fire (providing one held the trigger in the fire position) and pray that they hit something that they intended to. About the only one that comes to me off the top of my head... (NOW I wonder where THAT came from?!?) But I suppose that is used primarily in certain circles within the "gun culture", and I don't even like that term...

    Sometimes I fear we are losing more than a fair share of our language not only when we can't agree on how to talk about something like guns but to that infernal text speak... LOL, BRB, CUL8TR... RUBBISH! IMHO. *sigh*

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  2. Some of the language for flintlocks even goes back a bit further for earlier matchlocks and arquebuses. A phrase that some friends of mine tried to bring back: "No art will do you good if an Angel pisses in your pan."

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    1. I like that one! I'll have to see if I can resurrect it in Adam's regiment.

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