This article first appeared in the July 1978 issue of Shooting Times.

Gun writers are supposed to know everything, especially a whole bunch of words. I remember when I was first starting out in this racket and had to learn thousands of words like "barrel," "cylinder," "cartridge," "grips," "holster," and even more technical stuff than that. Over the years, I've built up what I think is a pretty good vocabulary of gun terms. A lot of these I steal from the works of other gun writers because I avidly read their stories for any good, new gun words I can lift.

A new one has been rearing its head and then ducking back out of sight during the last year in several of the better shooting publications. It showed up in one guy's column, then I saw it in a piece about a fancy rifle. It even slipped into a couple of well-written pro-gun articles I read. The way it was used was rather slippery, and I couldn't get a good hold on it. But since everybody else was using it, I knew I had to get it on my working list.

The word is panache. It looked to me like it ought to be pronounced "pawnatch," and I had a vague impression it meant something along the lines of "slumgullion" or maybe "mishmash." In the end, I had to do something that always hurts my pride: I looked it up in my Webster's Collegiate, which has had uncut pages in it ever since I got kicked out of college in 1948.

Here's what panache means: (pe´näsh) n. 1: an ornamental tuft (as of feathers) esp. on a helmet 2: dash or flamboyance in style or action: VERVE.

Hell, I'd been missing out on using some of my best stories for years because I didn't know the meaning of the firearms word panache. I've held back dozens of them from publication simply because I was unfamiliar with a two-syllable word that would qualify them for inclusion in the gun rags.

An example is a tale I've heard for years that took place in one of our Western states during the height of conflict between us and the Axis. The names used are absolutely nothing like the names of the real-life players.

One was an ex-federal officer on military leave to the Army Air Force as a bomber pilot and trainer of bomber crews. Let's call him "Tim." Tim had been a sharp and aggressive, if sometimes restless, law enforcement official. He carried these qualities with him into the air arm where his sometimes stultifying duties mainly consisted of flying green crews over the monotonous desert terrain so they might drop lightly charged practice bombs on, or at, targets of opportunity.

Now Tim was from an old ranching family; he had a revered uncle named Jack, a past middle-aged wiry cowpoke who ran a goodly number of cows and fair-to-sorry horses on a spread only about 50 miles or so from the bum brothers' practice range.

In need of diversion, Tim decided to fly over Uncle Jack's spread one spring morning to see how the old duffer's place was greening up. Making a low pass, he was pleased to see his relative accompanied by a couple of Mexican cowboys, hazing about 50 or 60 head of coyote-wild crowbaits down the side of a mountain toward the main horse pasture. The jaded attitude of riders and beasts suggested that there had been several days of argument before the caballada had given up its wild, free mountain home and agreed to plod back to the domesticity of the home pasture.