DEAR MR. PUNCH,--Aware as you must be of a deplorable confusion
now prevailing in the public mind as to the true inwardness of the
expressions "gadget" and "stunt," you will agree, I am sure, that the
moment has come for a clear and authoritative ruling on this vexed
point. At a time when the pundits of the Oxford Dictionary are coldly
aloof, like GALLIO, and the Army Council, though often approached,
studiously reserve their decision, it rests with you Mr. Punch, as
Arbiter of National Opinion, to give judgment.
What notion, then, of "gadget" and "stunt" is gained by the young
subaltern of today as he joins his regiment and shakes down to the
fundamental facts of life and death? He finds himself harassed by no
end of devilish enemy stunts, to stultify which a fatherly all-wise
War Office has given him an infinity of gadgets. For every stunt
an appropriate countering gadget. Does the foe strafe him with a
gas-bombing stunt? "Ha, ha!" laughs he, and dons that unlovely but
priceless gadget, his box-respirator. But by no means all gadgets have
just one peculiar stunt to counter; such a definition would exclude,
for instance, the height-gauge on a plane, which is emphatically,
wholly and eternally a gadget of gadgets. Moreover, gadgets are small
things. The airman's "joystick" is a gadget; the tank is not. Now are
these views sound, Sir, or is it permissible, as one authority does,
to describe persons as "gadgets"?
One final word. A nervous subaltern recently appeared before his
Adjutant and called the Wurzel-Flummery Electro-Dynamical Apparatus,
Mark II., "this sky-plotter stunt." "Great Heavens!" gasped the
Adjutant, "what is the Service coming to? Stunt? Gadget, man, gadget!"
Three days later the hapless boy found himself desired to resign on
the grounds of "gross ignorance of military terminology."