Gotta Love the Language Arts of Tacticool
Dr. John Woods 08.01.16
Tacti-what? This new generation of weapon’s (guns) enthusiasts has apparently been raised on a steady diet of acronyms, mil-spec designations, Emoji’s, hyphenated non-words, street hype, gun shop slang, ballistic mumbo-jumbo, combat colloquialisms, and non-descript barrack’s rattle they now call tacticool. So, where exactly that term came from is anybody’s guess. And so, why bother?
This past year I have directed a federal grant from the U.S. Department of Labor. The learning curve in terms of understanding the millennial language used in the grant as well as in conference calls from the administration “sorority girls” (as Michael Savage calls them) is amazing. You can’t even understand what the hell they are talking about most of the time. They assume everybody is versed in the gov’ment lingo, but few of us are. It’s an epidemic.
A lot of this new language evolution has been rolling over into survivalist, prepper, and weapons material for the past few years. It has been coming on pretty fast, and it is hard to keep up with and fully understand. For this reason, I write this tome to warn preppers to take time to fully digest this language and to not be fooled or misled by it. Much of it is just window dressing trash talk and marketing hype anyway to lure in a segment of readership that has been slipping away via iPhones and other technologies.
So, take text descriptions like “I ‘lased’ the target” or “check the scope’s reticle algorithms” with a grain of salt. The last time I “lased” anything I was taking a nap with the lap pooch in my recliner. That’s an explanation almost anybody can understand.
Some newbies to prepping have recently sent emails asking what this term or that term means, and though I chuckle to myself, I try to fully explain what I know if there is in fact anything to be known. Most of the time I can muddle through an author’s depiction of some new product review or technique trying to decipher the millennial lingo.
The really fun part is thinking from my higher education background that most of these 18-22 year old Generation Z (for zombies I guess) junior warriors probably can’t even read the articles to begin with much less understand them. The next generation up that served proudly in the sand dunes or other scrappy places probably do “get it,” since I think this is where most of the terminology coinage comes from. So be it, just read it with interest and bypass the blow.
