Thinking of buying a toy gun for christmas?

[Vladd67]

Ah the differences in our joint language
You say Burglarize we say Burgle
You say car theft we say Twocking
You say alcoholic we say a friday lunchtime
The joy of the English language.

[dustinzgirl]

Twocking does not sound like anything you would do outdoors in public.

[Vladd67]

Well it is usually done when no one is watching

[dustinzgirl]

Originally Posted by Vladd67

Well it is usually done when no one is watching

Good point. But it definetly doesn't sound like something you'd do with a car. Maybe in a car. But not with one. Well I guess that would be possible....uh, nevermind............well apparently two cars can twock. Who knew?

[Vladd67]

Man admits 'having sex' with 1,000 cars - Telegraph
Car sex man enjoys sex with cars | Metro.co.uk

[dustinzgirl]

Originally Posted by Vladd67

Man admits 'having sex' with 1,000 cars - Telegraph
Car sex man enjoys sex with cars | Metro.co.uk

How promiscuous of him!

Wonder if he wears protection? (So he doesn't get carrnorhea? carpes? CTDs?)

[nixie]

Please don't stray to far from the original topic

Toy guns where banned in my son's nursery, didn't stop the kids from pretending other things were guns.

[Vladd67]

Originally Posted by nixie

Toy guns where banned in my son's nursery, didn't stop the kids from pretending other things were guns.

Friend of mine, his wife wouldn't let their son have toy guns so he just made them out of lego, the gun will find a way it seems.

[nixie]

When they use sticks its worse, someone always seems to get poked in the eye

[Ursa major]

Originally Posted by dustinzgirl

PS: Interference, LOL...I can't say burgle. I tried. I really, really did. Its not a word, its half a word!!!

But burglarise sounds like the act of people obtaining black-market corneas....


(With or without the use of sticks.)

[Drachir]

Originally Posted by dustinzgirl

Nice. Really nice. I don't think that either of those stereotyping comments was necessary, especially about the Muslims. That's just ridiculous thing to say in my opinion.

I hunt.

When I was a kid, my father lost his job in the logging industry. This was before we had welfare assistance in the extremely rural area where I grew up. We were hungry and my mother shot and skinned a deer feeding us for a month or so.

So I disagree with you on environmental issues because preserving the environment is one of the reasons why I was hungry and eventually homeless a child.

I disagree with you on gun control because having a rifle is one of the reasons why me and my siblings ate as children.

You people with your lives think that everyone lives and grows up in nice middle class houses with nice middle class families working in offices and driving minivans. You give absolutely no consideration to any other type of lifestyle. Sorry, I didn't grow up middle class, I grew up dirt rural Oregon poor. If you use the Internet, you'll find that some parts of rural Oregon are just as bad as some of the poorest countries. We even had to carry our own water sometimes. Yep thats right. I did not always live in houses with indoor plumbing.

I don't worship my rifles. I use them for hunting and practice. I find your comments rude and distasteful.

Hopefully we can carry on a conversation without stereotyping statements about religions and cultures.

PS: Repossession should be illegal also, IMO.

I retract nothing. And I refuse to get into a discussion over firearms with a US citizen. Been there - done that - waste of time. This is my last post in this thread.

[Dave]

Originally Posted by Drachir

I retract nothing. And I refuse to get into a discussion over firearms with a US citizen. Been there - done that - waste of time. This is my last post in this thread.

Probably better to forget the gun control issue and stick to the topic at hand, though someone I went to primary school with did accidentally shoot his friend's brother (IIRC) with his father's shotgun while playing with it, and personal experience does colour your own viewpoint.

My own mother would not allow us to have anything that fired anything (to protect our eyes) so we just went around to a friends house and played with their darts and their miniature cannons that fired matchsticks at 100mph and she never knew.

I knew parents that did not allow their children any toy guns at all, so their children used pieces of wood and other toys as pretend guns instead.

Similarly, I have acquaintances who ban sweets from their children, but rather than making them eat sweets responsibly, whenever they are given the chance their children gorge themselves on as many sweets as they can possibly eat in the shortest possible time.

Banning anything has that effect - it is the surest way to make a new book or a film popular.

Rather than ban, I think we need to look at why children want to play with guns. I don't wish to sound like one of the "four yorkshiremen" from the Monty Python sketch, but when I was a lad we had a staple diet of westerns and second world war films to reinact. It didn't cause us any serious harm, but I do wonder whether the gangster rap and gun-toting pop videos are a different level.

[Peter Graham]

Oh if my children weren't home I wouldn't do anything about anything and just let the masked man take all the stuff that we have and rape me and my dog.

You're deliberately avoiding the question, DG! But never mind - perhaps we were drifting off topic.

You know, I don't think Americans are rude, but I will say that we are very abrupt and vehement in our arguments.

I think that is a fair point. But the problem with the "abrupt and vehement" style is that it frequently involves massive oversimplification of the issues and ends up being an ill thought out, kneejerk reaction. We have something very similar over here in what is known as 'pub arguments'. In the classic pub argument, the person who shouts loudest and mocks the other arguments best appears to win. Or rather, everyone else just gives up. The classic pub arguer expressly rejects shades of grey as being the domain of nancy-boy intellectuals who don't live in something called "the real world" and reduces every issue down to a very small number of often entirely incorrect assumptions on which they base their own, usually very reactionary arguments. Classic assumptions include:-

1. Foreigners can't be trusted.

2. The British Empire was an unswerving force for good.

3. The government is run by a small coterie of wet liberals who would rather give all of our money to asylum seeking terrorists than to hospitals.

4. Things were better in the olden days.

5. England stand a chance of winning a major football tournament.

PS: You know, warning shots in the air have a lot of uses. For instance, we have a cougar problem up here, not at my house which is in the valley but up on the mountain where my aunt and uncle and cousin live its been an issue. They don't want to kill any cougars because the population is waning anyways, but they will fire in the air to scare it away.

I have absolutely no problem with this. I probably sound like I am absolutely opposed to firearms. In fact, I'm not. I accept that firearms have a place for farmers and people living in rural communities when it comes to pest control or - as in your example - protection from potentially dangerous wild animals. But I do feel very strongly that they have no place in urban environments or as a tool for self-protection.

Regards

Peter

PS: Slang fans may be intersted to know that "twocking" is a rare example of an acronym which has been turned into a verb.

[Vladd67]

T.W.O.C - Taking without consent

[Peter Graham]

Pedant's Corner:-

Taking Without Owner's Consent

I've thought of another one. Criminal hacks sometimes refer to drink drivers as being OPLs (as though it were a noun), which is an acronym for "over the prescribed limit". Another feature of our healthy British attitude to intoxication...