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>as are loose women?
or not..
(perhaps I should have written "some cannons are threaded....")
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cannons are "threaded", after a fashion..
...but threadnodists' canons are almost never loose.
sorry...
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Well, a loose cannon would be one that is cut a bit too large for the caliber shell required, and, in the old days, they would have to employ the ramrod rather emphatically in order to tighten the shell against the charge...? sounds good to me!
And, of course, the artillery units who employed the largest caliber cannon balls were considered to be the "big shots".
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a loose cannon would be one that is cut a bit too large for the caliber shell required
And I thought a loose cannon was one not securely fastened to the deck; one that moves about unpredictably and dangerously after being fired, causing as much potential harm to the gun crew as to their intended target.
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And I thought a loose cannon was one not securely fastened to the deck; one that moves about unpredictably and dangerously after being fired, causing as much potential harm to the gun crew as to their intended target.Uh, Faldo...didn't ya see the twinkle in me eye when I was a-tellin' the aboveforementioned yarn? 
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the twinkle in me eye
Uh-huh.
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old hand
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old hand
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Was interested to hear today that there is a link between the expressions "big shot" and "loose woman". - STALES FALDAGE: (post edit apology, mw) said "cannons" in whiteout. One is a bore with big balls and one balls with a big bore. Honest Jackie, I don't like this kind of stuff. I just wanted to try to clear this space for erudite studies about words. ()
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both are cannons
There you go again. I din't say nothin of the sort!
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Beware of the left hand thread. And tight is preferable to loose.
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Bill:
In my mind, a cannon has no rifling in the barrel. They were basically smooth-bores, I thought. I looked up cannon in the OED and found this: . A piece of ordnance; a gun or fire-arm of a size which requires it to be mounted for firing. (The leading current sense.) The following varieties are mentioned in the 16th-17th c.: Canon Royall, height 8 1/2 in.; shot 66 lbs. Canon, height 8 in.; shot 60 lbs. Canon Sarpentine, height 7 1/2 in.; shot 53 lbs. Bastard Canon, height 7 in.; shot 41 lbs. Demy Canon, height 6 1/2 in.; shot 30 lbs. Canon Petro, height 6 in.; shot 24 lbs.
The various sizes are of interest, particularly the canon petro. I wondered if it has any relationship to a petard, but apparently it doesn't. There's no definition in the OED for petro other than as a combining name for rock or petroleum, but petard comes back as having derived from the french word for fart, peter, with one of those accenty things over the first e.
I also looked up rifle; the first use of that word with relation to a gunbarrel is 1750, the middle of the 18th century, which lends some confirmation to my supposition that cannon is an earlier invention and was essentialy a smooth-bore.
TEd
TEd
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