Members of the Purple Hull Society, a group of friends that shares a common love of the 16-gauge shotgun, got a little testy late in the duck season when the Society convened for its annual convention at Mill Bayou in Arkansas County.
Attending that meeting were Glen Chase of Conway, Connie Meskimen of Hot Springs, Jimmy Rowe of DeWitt and the group's chairman, Jess "The Undertaker" Essex of DeWitt.
Essex, a funeral director in DeWitt, likes his nickname, but one of his relatives recently complained that it sounds like a pro 'rasslin handle. We sensed that he derived an extra measure of satisfaction from this revelation.
We believe it befits a gentleman who in mid-conversation can throw up a Stevens Model 311 side-by-side and shoot a duck overhead that nobody else noticed and have it land almost in his lap without so much as a stutter. The Undertaker also hunts in a tie and vest, and he weaves an immaculate Windsor knot.
As we reported in this space on Jan. 17, the Purple Hull Society convention ended badly on a frigid day when Essex's surface-drive motor refused to start. He swore it was the only time it happened all season.
With Chase and me in the boat, Essex attempted CPR on his carburetor while a stiff current swept us across the lake. Essex lost a crucial part, ensuring the motor's disability for the day and prompting a mass duck blind evacuation by paddle power.
In a later feature about a duck hunt with a different group near Stuttgart, I observed that surface-drive motors with stock mufflers, including the Undertaker's, are not excessively loud. By email, Meskimen retorted, "You mentioned in today's column that The Undertaker's motor was quiet.
"Wouldn't you have to hear it run first before making that conclusion?"
Meskimen also emailed a YouTube tutorial to Essex on how to rebuild a Briggs & Stratton carburetor. It touched the intended nerve.
Essex reported finding the lost part and restoring the motor to running condition on Jan. 31, by which time, of course, the season was done.
Killing the harvest
Karl Hansen of Hensley recently noted that we kill game in Arkansas Democrat-Gazette outdoors articles rather than "harvest" it.
"As a kid on the farm in Franklin County, we KILLED HOGS," Hansen wrote. "We never harvested them. That term was for sorghum cane, black eyed peas, turnips, etc.
"I don't think the Cheyenne 'harvested' buffalo any more than Grampa McMurray 'harvested' gray squirrels! So a sincere thanks for your contribution to what I regard as a return to sanity in those matters."
Substituting "harvest" for "kill" was an attempt by the hook-and-bullet media to blunt criticism from anti-hunters by softening hunting's terminal reality. Hunters do not catch and release their prey, and "harvesting" game attempts to euphemize what some consider an awkward conversation point.
Opinion makers, notably editors for the major outdoors magazines and communications staff for state game and fish management agencies, promoted the euphemism as a preferred expression. It was supposed to make us seem kinder and gentler.
It wound up making us look dishonest. I have never heard anyone afield or in a hunting camp say he or she harvested a deer, turkey or any other game. They killed it, and they said so.
A younger generation of outdoors journalists saw the dishonesty itself as a rhetorical weakness, and "harvest" quietly returned to its agricultural context.
Nowhere is political correctness more rampant than among the shooting community. Gun snobs come unhinged when someone substitutes the word "magazine" for "clip."
A magazine is an area of a firearm from which ammunition is fed into the breech.
A clip is a device that stores individual ammunition cartridges as a single unit and is inserted into a magazine.
Explaining the difference is tedious. Over the years, the commercial media has used the terms so interchangeably that they have become indistinguishable to the general public.
The error undermines a journalist's credibility, but everyone understands the context.
Some things are worth getting bent over, and some aren't. For the sake of clarity, that one doesn't offend me.
Sports on 02/17/2019