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 millennium 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 band 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 outshot 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 Britney Spears news detailed by the networks” and “accomplishments of the Republican Congress just adjourned.”
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
