The spread of the "ranged weapon"/"melee weapon" classification terminology from the roleplaying games world into writings on real-world anthropology and military history (without acknowledgement of the direction of the borrowing!) is a personal pet peeve. I haven't been able to pinpoint Wikipedia, much less a specific article, as the source of this but it seems to have at the very least accelerated the trend.
Is anyone scholarly using "melee" that way? Or is it just ignorant amateurs? I've only encountered the latter (but I, and all my friends, find it hard to avoid saying "melee" to mean "hand-to-hand", because we were all D&D players before we were anything else).
Anyway, much as I do it, it annoys me too.
Related peeve, though as far as I know this is still restricted to gamers... How do you feel about "akimbo" meaning "wielding two guns, one in each hand", I believe that's from CounterStrike.
Or perhaps the word "glaive", to mean a thrown multi-bladed spinning weapon? I believe from Warcraft.
>> Or perhaps the word "glaive", to mean a thrown multi-bladed spinning weapon? I believe from Warcraft.
No no, Krull (1983):
Colwyn is found and nursed by Ynyr, the Old One. Ynyr tells Colwyn that the Beast can be defeated with the Glaive, an ancient, magical, five-pointed throwing star.
Incidentally, Krull is like many other fantasy films of that era (there was a bit of a trend at the time, it appears) that are very much like (some) D&D scenarios: the plot is essentially a string of little vignettes in each of which the good guys confront some terrible enemy and defeat it, culminating to a big boss fight at the end. Frex, Conan the Barbarian (1982) is very much like that, as is The Beastmaster (1982).
