We’ve taken some flak from readers who have finished my book, “Vikings, Vampires, and Mailmen,” and have noted that the metal thing filled with bullets you load into a gun isn’t called a clip, it’s called a magazine. Well, they’re right. That isn’t lost upon us.
The thing is, we call our magazines “clips” for the same reason US Marines call their parade grounds a “deck,” or how sailors tell you to “batten down the hatches” when they mean to use bungee cords, not battens, to secure hatches and loose items. The term “clip” we use comes from World War II, specifically the M-1 Garand rifle. It was the standard-issue rifle for US soldiers.
You see, a single-shot rifle has a barrel, and behind it is a chamber where you load one bullet, and then fire. In multi-shot guns, you generally have a magazine that stores the bullets and loads them one at a time into the chamber. Some weapons have removable magazines, and some don’t. When you have a removable magazine, like with modern pistols, the spring that pushes the bullets up is in the magazine, and you put the whole thing — bullets, spring, containment device and all — into the handle of the pistol, and everything works.
With the M-1 Garand, the magazine was built into the rifle. You took a pack of bullets, held in a cheap metal clip, and pushed them into the magazine. When the bullets were done firing, the clip was ejected, but the magazine was still inside the rifle. Basically, a clip just holds the bullets together, but the magazine does all the work.
Many of the guys who helped build the USVS that you know and love today were WWII vets. They beat the Nazis and they beat the bugs, and damned if I’m going to say that the words they used to do so were wrong.
Today, my team still says “clip,” but we mean “magazine.” We also ask for more “film,” when we mean flash cards for our digital cameras. Just throwing it out there in case you didn’t understand that sometimes old habits are hard to break.