Yeah, and US military designations weren’t much better, what with “M4” standing for, as I recall, a rifle, a light tank, a medium tank, and an artillery tractor. Sigh.
“Kitchener” has a certain “pride in the Empire” sound to it; I like it. But I find myself referring to it as I work on it as the “Gomphothere” (Gomphothere - Wikipedia), and we all know how working titles tend to stick.
Thanks for the advice on the configuration. The vehicle in the picture is the first mockup, and the final version will be more enclosed, with a couple tall (tongue-in-cheek tall) external exhaust stacks and a roof rack. Oh, and a flagpole.
The Vickers-Armstrong Samwise Mk IV (in American service, it would be referred to as the “M6 Jenny”, better known as the “Jackass” for the sound of its overtaxed powerplant)
I believe the common usage here is “revolver = type of pistol with a spinny round series of chambers”. Isn’t that how it works in the rest of the colonies?
When ever I do hear the expression “Pistol”, it usually refers to a revolver in an old Western film. More commonly I hear “Handgun” to refer to either a revolver or a semiautomatic, but then I hang out with military types all the time.
Hah, I only refer to them as “Those fucking Glocks”
While I applaud the quality of Glock’s firearms, I just can’t stand a number of the features their weapons are known for, ie: the weird trigger safety, the lack of a thumb switch safety, and no hammer (I’m used to looking at the hammer to get a quick reference for the weapon’s readyness to fire)
What can I say? My boots are made from tanned animal hide and are secured to my feet with string.
All I know is that it is considered uncouth by my NCOs to refer to an M16A2 Assault Rifle as a gun.
Yes, it is, but “Pistol” in the US generally refers to a semi-automatic handgun, with “Revolver” denoting handguns with the rotating cylinder.
In this part of the world no distinction is made as to whether “Pistol” refers to any handgun, or just semi-auto models as in the US.Thus, in the Commonwealth, All revolvers are pistols, but not all pistols are revolvers, if that makes sense. We don’t call semi-automatics “Revolvers” because they clearly aren’t, but we do call Revolvers “Pistols” because they are (“Pistol” being a synonym for “Handgun”), if that makes sense.
Personally, I prefer “Handgun” as an all-encompassing term.
I rather like this one…appropriate, yet esoteric enough that an uninformed observer might think this was the technical term for the vehicle, rather than a name.
Anyway, the first thing that occurred to me, though, considering the vehicle’s builder and theater of operations, was to give it an “adopted” foreign/colonial name…
“Howdah,” a type of elephant saddle/carriage came to mind immediately—there’s actually a faint resemblance between the two, and IIRC, there was at least one type of early British tank that featured a turret or gun emplacement that was quickly nicknamed a “howdah,” due to it’s high and seemingly awkward placement. So, there’s precedent.
Sir James Bazalgette designed the London sewer system to pump crap out of our homes. His descendant Peter Bazalgette works for Endemol - the media company that created Big Brother. I like the comment from QI host Stephen Fry - that Peter Bazalgette was undoing his great-grandfather’s works by “pumping shit back into our homes.”
