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We are well into the first decade of the 21st century,
and we still don't have a convenient term for the period,
the way we talk about the eighties
or
nineties.
As we were preparing for the new millenium
seven years ago, I suggested we might resurrect a locution
from a century ago, and call these years the
aughts.
After all, I can remember my grandparents talking about
something that happened in nineteen and aught eight,
and the term worked for them. Aught
means zero;
an aught
is a variation of a naught
(in the
same way that a napron
became an apron
), and
naught
comes from the Old English word for
nothing.
So aught
has a fine linguistic pedigree, but the
only time it appears in common speech is when guys are
talking about guns and somebody mentions an aught
six.
This waning year is also an aught six,
but the
phrase comes from 1906, when the U.S. Army slightly
modified its .30-caliber rifle of 1903 -- that is, the
.30-03 -- to produce the .30-06. The cartridge for this
rifle must have been a successful design, because to this
day the thirty aught six
is a popular hunting
round.
Before that, ammunition was generally named by caliber (expressed in hundredths of an inch, as with .22-caliber) and the cartridge load, expressed in grains of black powder.
(This seems to be Parenthesis Day here. Black
powder
is traditional gunpowder, made from sulfur,
charcoal and saltpeter. Just about everybody these days
uses smokeless powder,
which is made from high
explosives like nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin.)
So, a .32-20
-- my dad had both a rifle and
pistol that shot that ammo, and it was also the name of a
Denver jug bad that one of my sons-in-law played in years
ago -- was .32 caliber, and the cartridge had 20 grains of
black powder.
In our military, the .30-06 replaced the .30-40 Krag, which was .30 caliber with 40 grains of powder. I had an uncle who hunted deer with the Krag, and he swore by it. But during the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Spanish soldiers with their German-designed Mausers out-shot the Americans with their Krags. So our army's Ordinance Department licensed some Mauser patents and designed an improved bolt-action rifle, the .30-03 that became the .30-06.
Of all the caliber-powder designations, the most famous
must be the Winchester .30-30,
which of course was
.30 caliber with 30 grains of powder. I once saw
30-30
in a newspaper story, and called the editor to
say it should have been .30-30
and explained why. I
was told that nobody cares about such trivia.
I warned that editor about provoking the wrath of gun fanciers, as well as dangerous English majors and enraged history buffs, but she's still alive and well.
And so, to the best of my knowledge, is the editor of an adult-Western series that Martha and I used to write for. The episodes all took place in 1860-61, before brass cartridges were in common use. People either poured powder into the chambers or used paper cartridges.
In one of the series Westerns, not written by us, there
was a scene where the hero and his company are surrounded
by bad guys, and there are piles of spent brass cartridges
around them. I mentioned this anachronism to the editor,
who said that These books are read by guys in truck
stops who wouldn't know.
I mentioned that of all segments of American society,
the ones most likely to know their firearms history are
guys in truck stops,
and he ought not to have such
contempt for the people who kept us working. In the
interest of continued work, I didn't pursue the argument; I
might as well have, since that editor quit buying from us
shortly thereafter.
The thirty-thirty
even entered computer
terminology as the winchester disk drive.
One
version has it that Winchester
was IBM's internal
code name for the hard disk it invented and put on the
market in 1973. Another says that the first IBM hard disks
had two spindles, each holding 30 megabytes, making it a
30-30 which inspired the Winchester
designation.
This wasn't that long ago, so you'd think that there
would be a definitive account, rather than competing
folklore versions, to explain why hard disks used to be
called winchesters.
That term is now as outdated as aught,
which
despite its unpopularity is still a good term for this
decade, since it so well describes such contemporary
matters as value of the latest Brittany Spears news
detailed by the networks
and accomplishments of the
Republican congress just adjourned.
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