dahermit said:
…as in studied metalurgy…
Metallurgy has two 'l's', same as 'metallic'. Sorry, couldn't help myself.
I've been casting for decades but never used the term "smelting" with reference to melting that I can recall. There is smelting, melting, alloying, fusing, welding, brazing, soldering. They all seem to be incorrectly used among shooters at one time or another. We could probably start a dictionary of shooter's commonly misused terms. Here are a couple of other candidates:
Headspace. Headspace literally means the space a case head fits inside of. Do we ever need to put case heads inside other cases in normal reloading? No. So a case normally has no use for headspace, though I'm sure someone will point out that an open tip bullet jacket formed from a smaller caliber case does, in fact, put the smaller case's head inside a case. But that's inside the neck, which is not the dimension the term
headspace normally brings to mind.
Obturate.
Obturate has the same root as
obstruct. It means to seal something off with an obstruction, as when the little Dutch boy's finger obturated the leak path in the dike by obstructing it. Most shooters use the term to mean upsetting a bullet outward against a bore by pressure and say "the bullet has been obturated", when, in fact, the upset bullet has obturated the bore, sealing it off from leaking gas as any obstruction might also do. It is the bore that becomes obturated, not the bullet. The bullet is merely upset. (Where is a crying emoji when you need it?) ;_;
Datum. A datum is a reference location from which other dimensions are measured. An object with a perpendicular hole through its surface the same diameter as a cartridge shoulder datum may be used as a case shoulder datum locating gage. So the object with a hole in it is a datum gage, but not the datum itself. A cylinder the same diameter as the chamber shoulder datum may be used as a chamber datum locating gage to determine headspace, but there are a number of additional measurements needed to locate the breech face with respect to it, so it is unusefully complicated to do.
Other examples would be interesting for the collection.
However, as mentioned earlier, the object of the exercise is to communicate clearly. If a term is misused in a way in which nobody can mistake the meaning, then whether it is correctly applied or not is of secondary importance to the communication itself. When someone says a case has headspace, I know they mean the head-to-shoulder datum length. However, I have seen sentences in which it was ambiguous as to whether "headspace" was referring to the chamber or the cartridge dimensions. In such an instance, communication is ambiguous and requires the reader to deduce the author's intended meaning from clues in the rest of the post. This is tiring to the reader, slows down how fast he can read and comprehend by forcing him to keep the potential error in mind as he does detective work to clarify meaning. Many people don't want to work that hard at reading and just blow off the post because of it.
Correct vocabulary, spelling, and punctuation have the advantage of removing ambiguity and speeding up both reading and comprehension. There is a program called Grammarly that has a free version for browsers and that reads and corrects pretty much all of the above automatically while you work in the composition window. It catches typo's of mine all the time.
Download here.
Review here.
Thank you so much. I couldn't possible have continued casting after misusing that word for 22+ years...
I'll defer any comments about "headspace" to Mr. Guffy...
