It's bad enough when TV shows refer to fired cartridge cases as "spent shell casings," but it goes too far when legitimate news sources do the same. From The Guardian: "A spent bullet shell casing in Villa Union, Coahuila..." Go to any place that sells ammunition and reloading equipment (That's "make your own ammo" stuff) and you'll learn that the proper name is "cartridge case." It's also colloquially called, simply, "brass." However, NO firearms-savvy person calls cases "shell casings." Example: https://www.hornady.com/reloading/cartridge-cases#!/

I'd trust their reporting more if they'd use proper nomenclature.

But but but the cops on TV say that all the time! Where the heck have their tech advisors been all these years?

I won't even dare get you started on automatic & semi-automatic

It gets even worse with anatomy! I hear lots of women referring to their vulvas as "vaginas." How could they not know the difference? Is it Eve Ensler's fault? Do they think it's a Swedish car?

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Originally posted by Geoff:
It gets even worse with anatomy! I hear lots of women referring to their vulvas as "vaginas." How could they not know the difference? Is it Eve Ensler's fault? Do they think it's a Swedish car?

I have to ask... just how often does your conversation with female friends and relatives turn to this particular topic that you hear "lots of women" say this?

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Originally posted by BobHale:


I have to ask... just how often does your conversation with female friends and relatives turn to this particular topic that you hear "lots of women" say this?

Type "vulva" into a search engine and, after a few clinical explanations, you'll get a host of "vagina" posts. Waaaay too many don't know the difference.

Second question then. What else will I find if I check your search history? Not to mention "why"?

Another situation wherein the writer doesn't know what she's saying, from In These Times: "Library staff work to remove the need for police officers within libraries and focus on de-escalating training."

One would think she'd want to escalate training! I think she meant "...de-escalation-training," but noooo, she says the opposite!

Bob, you are hilarious, though I have to admit that I had the same questions too.

Related to "vulva" and "vagina," no woman I know gets them mixed up, but then, Bob is correct; I don't talk about them that much to other women so who knows.

I'd have gotten the cartridge case wrong, though. While guns aren't in my vernacular, unfortunately in the U.S. way too many people know about them.

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cartridge

And originally cartridges were made out of paper before they became brass. Why, oh why did the language have to change? (Etymology: English cartridge < French cartouche < Italian cartuccia < carta < Latin charta 'papyrus; poem; map' < Greek χάρτης 'sheet of papyrus, book'.)

Words often acquire technical denotations when adapted into a jargon. Take the word, hack, which probably comes from or was influenced by Yiddish. Originally it meant 'a creative solution to a problem' (either in a computer program or physical reality. Then it came to mean a quick and dirty fix to something. After the Hackers Club, it has come to mean malicious changes to a program or breaking into somebody's account. When people on Facebook tell folks to ignore any friend requests which seemingly came from them because they have been hacked, I just roll my eyes, but I do not pretend to misunderstand them. Almost all of these fake accounts or more a kind of phishing or impersonation. No hacking occurred some miscreant merely "borrowed" a profile photo and a name, then went through the person's friends list to try to get those friends to friend them again. I mean it might kind of be a kind of hack in the older sense of the word, but not because of anything the person being imitated did.

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"vulva" and "vagina"

A rhetorical figure, pars pro toto (or synecdoche)? Like saying South Pole, instead of Antarctica. Vagina 'sheath' and vulva 'womb, matrix' in Latin were kind of adopted in Medieval Latin medical terminology. Latin cunnus and English cunt were seen as vulgar so euphemism ensued. It's like when English shit or French merde got replaced by Latin fæx, fæces, which literally means 'dregs'.

Until recently I had associated "hack" with chopping something, as in hacking one's way through brush with a machete. I guess it's an easy leap from literal hacking to cyber-hacking.

As for the vagina/vulva issue, here's an article from HuffPost: https://www.huffpost.com/entry...99dfe4b06317990f73c8