When did the word 'fire' first start being used as meaning 'discharge your weapon'

December 17, 2007 12:06 AM

When did the word 'fire' first start being used as meaning 'discharge your weapon'

I'm just curious, cause I thought it must of started after gunpowder was invented, right?? Cause I was watchin Lord of the Rings (gotta love tnt marathons) and when they were battling and the org commander guy yells "FIRE!" I was like, hey they wouldn't say that. Cause they still use bows and arrows in that movie. There wouldn't have been a concept of FIRE.

Anyone care to clarify?

posted by 0217174 to media & arts (9 comments total)

You are probably right. I can give you the OED entry:

12. a. To apply fire to (a charge of gunpowder) in order to cause its explosion; to discharge or let off (a gun, firework, etc.), explode (a mine, etc.). Also, to fire off.
to fire a salute, to fire a certain number of guns as a salute; to fire a broadside, to fire all the guns on one side of a ship. Also fig.
1530 PALSGR. 550/1 Fyer this pece..affustez ceste piece. 1602 SHAKES. Ham. V. ii. 281 Let all the Battlements their Ordinance fire. 1699 W. HACKE Coll. Voy. IV. 37 They load them with loose Powder..and they fire them with Stoneshot. 1705 BERKELEY Cave Dunmore Wks. 1871 IV. 506, I desired one of our company to fire off his gun. 1799 G. SMITH Laboratory I. 17 These sorts of rockets are fired on a board or stand. 1840 R. H. DANA Bef. Mast xxvii. 91 At sundown, another salute of the same number of guns was fired. 1847 MARRYAT Childr. N. Forest xv, Edward fired his gun into the body of the man. 1883 J. GILMOUR Among Mongols xxvi. 315 A grey-headed old man comes out and fires off crackers. 1886 MRS. E. LYNN LINTON Paston Carew xl, Only when Mary fired a broadside into her character..did Mrs. Richard give tongue in her behalf.
posted by vacapinta at 12:13 AM on December 17, 2007

According to the online etymology dictionary ""to fire a gun," the ... sense being from "set fire to gunpowder," attested from 1530."
posted by b33j at 12:13 AM on December 17, 2007

Followup question: what would the correct command be? Would it be "Loose!"?
posted by vacapinta at 12:21 AM on December 17, 2007

Discharge.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:30 AM on December 17, 2007

I've read that the command "Volley!" has been used to command (say) longbowmen to shoot arrows.
posted by ten pounds of inedita at 12:31 AM on December 17, 2007

I think 'loose!' was also used for archers, but I'm not sure why I think that.

The original guns had you literally touching a slow match to an outer pan of gunpowder, which would catch fire, travel into the gun, and eventually cause the gun to fire. Eventually, they went to flintlock muskets, which is where the trigger came from; you'd cock the gun, and pulling the trigger would pull a piece of flint forward into a piece of iron, causing a shower of sparks to hit the pan. The pan would flash, the fire would burn its way inside, and then a heartbeat later, boom! You had to keep aiming the whole time. It was a very slow process. It was still obviously 'fire!' at that point.

Once they went to percussion caps, which is still how it's done today, I suspect they just stayed with 'fire!' from tradition. Armies are very, very long on tradition; it's been said that they're always fighting the previous war. :)
posted by Malor at 1:37 AM on December 17, 2007

You'll probably like this essay where Walter Nelson complains about silliness related to Hollywood depiction of archery. He claims that the only accurate medieval commands were "knock" and "stretch."
posted by Lame_username at 7:15 AM on December 17, 2007

0217174: "Cause I was watchin Lord of the Rings (gotta love tnt marathons) and when they were battling and the org commander guy yells "FIRE!" I was like, hey they wouldn't say that. Cause they still use bows and arrows in that movie. There wouldn't have been a concept of FIRE."

Examining the etymology of Lord of the Rings is a complicated task. In the setting of the books, no one is actually speaking English, instead they are speaking Westron. In fact, the storyline behind the story (in the Foreward of Fellowship) is that Tolkien translated the entire story from the Red Book of Westmarch (Frodo and Bilbo's memoirs), which were written in Westron, and in doing so translated virtually every name and location and other things into English. There a lot of examples in that Wikipedia article.

This isn't to say it wasn't actually a mistake, but one could make the argument that it's not a big deal since in the "real" fictional history, the word yelled wouldn't have been "fire" or "shoot" or "volley" or any other English word, and thus it was just a mistranslation.
posted by Plutor at 9:27 AM on December 17, 2007

didn't see anyone had it yet, so thought I'd better -- it's orc, not org =D
posted by Quarter Pincher at 2:42 PM on December 17, 2007