shootery
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Pronunciation
[edit]Noun
[edit]shootery (usually uncountable, plural shooteries)
- (uncommon, uncountable) Synonym of marksmanship (“the art of shooting”).
- 1883 July 25, “Events of the Week. By the Office Boy's Mother”, in Judy, or the London Serio-Comic Journal[1], volume 33, page 37:
- Come, girls, there's rumoured war, so practice archery,
And drill yourselves in shootery and marchery;
And if you think you'd like to have a colonel, one
You'll find in me, [illegible]. —The Office Boy's Maternal One.
- (uncommon, countable) Synonym of shooting range (“a place to practice marksmanship”).
- 1912, Proceedings of the New Jersey Conference of Charities and Correction. Eleventh Annual Meeting, Orange, New Jersey, March 24th, 25th, and 26th, 1912[2], Trenton, New Jersey: MacCrellish and Quigley, State Printers:
- Mother—"Husband, that shooter-tutor is too hard on the boy. The bows are too big and the lad is kept at his home-work so long and so late that his little arms are all lame and he doesn't sleep at night."
Father—"Oh, don't worry, mother, that'll be all right. The shooter ought to know his business."
Mother—"He may know his business, but he doesn't know our boy. You must speak to him about it."
In the course of time the father drops in and mildly reasons with the shooter, but is told—
"I'd like to know who's running this shootery? We have our course of shooting and the methods used are those of all the villages in the woods. Your boy is inattentive, troublesome and impertinent. Either your boy will learn to shoot as I teach him or you can take him home."
Thus the system asserted itself in the early days. No matter how much exasperated the parent may have felt; no matter how much he would have liked to tutor the shooter in the way to get along with boys, or to shoot the tutor for a wrong-headed idiot intrenched in an unbreakable system, he had to put up with the poor schooling or go back to more primitive customs and teach his boy himself.
- (uncommon, uncountable) Shooting; hunting.
- 1837, “Leaves from the journal of a traveller”, in The Metropolitan Magazine[3], volume 20, number September-December, page 76:
- After Theodoric came the long night of war, and darkness, and devastation. Sixtus V., an able pontiff, furthered the projects of some of his better predecessors, but died of course in the middle of his work. Pope after pope that came after him projected and prated in their sleepy way. One formed a company, to drink the place dry, or some such thing, by a miraculous draught. But somehow or other nothing succeeded, rights of fishery, and shootery, and wood cuttery, and heaven knows what, rose up, each enough to impede a dozen conclaves, so that one sovereign pontiff stuck in the bog after the other, cast up his eyes and his accounts, paid his own and nature's debts, and died and made no sign. If it can be a great merit to do what it was great shame to leave undone, as Dr. Johnson might have said, why that man may deserve encomium who succeeds where many have striven but to fail.