Readers and writers alike need to consider two crucial principles very carefully � and give them their due honor.
�Taste
Taste has two dimensions, horizontal and vertical.
In the horizontal dimension, some people like collecting stamps, playing bridge, or shooting while others groove on wind-sailing, TV sports, or bird-watching.
In the vertical dimension, maturity has a greater part. A beginner collector knows little at first and collects more or less indiscriminately then as he learns more and his taste matures, he specializes in a narrow field � drillings, vierlings, and other combination guns, for example, or Confederate handguns. A friend of mine collected rifle scopes and had a passel of oldies that I'd never heard of.
The classic adage de gustibus non disputandum est is Latin for "about taste, there's no disputing." An honorable person respects others' tastes however much they differ from his own.
� Opinion versus Fact
Facts are immune from opinion. They are what they are, irrespective of our opinions (water seeks its own level and runs downhill, mirrors reflect light, and falling objects in the atmosphere accelerate at a fixed rate, no matter what you and I opine or conjecture). If you want the answer to a question, don't look for it among a menu of opinions. Depending on what the question is, there may not be a "the" answer, anyway. But if there is a "the" answer, it is what it is, no matter what you or I may think.
In preparing my book Designing and Forming Custom Cartridges for publication, I tried several ways of arranging the cartridge drawings � by decimal and metric designations, by country of origin, by type of gun (rifle or handgun), in order of power, factory or wildcat, etc � and encountered with each arrangement problems that went away only when I arranged my drawings by the cartridges' designations in numerical and alphabetical order.
A good friend took vocal exception to this arrangement and to my published assertion that it was the best way that I'd tried. Nine years later, he still bitches about it � insists that the .357 Magnum drawing should be right after the .38 Special drawing, somewhere before the .38-55 Winchester, not just before the .358 Winchester (which should be before, not after, the .358 Norma Magnum). No explanation of the reasons for preferring the numerical-alphabetical arrangement sways him. I'm wrong for saying that it's the best way � for claiming that any way is the best way � but he doesn't hesitate to insist that his way is best. Oh, well � de gustibus non disputandum est.
