Magazines are not clips!

To be fair, subtleties of the English language or no, this is a pretty big deal. It's like the difference between 'worthless' and 'worth less'. If you said to someone learning English that something was worthless, they may ask you, "worth less than what?", which is an irrelevant question. This applies to both written and spoken English.

The classic example in spoken English would be the difference between fork handles and four candles, a joke that non-native English-speakers often don't understand.

Actually there is a difference in pronunciation, but it's widely (if not completely) ignored due to its subtlety. It does bother me when they're swapped over in written English, though.

YES!

One term that even trips me up is "tank cannon". We all love to say that tanks fire cannons, right?

Wrong.

Tanks fire guns. Yes, that 120-150mm gigantic tube is called a "gun". Yes, even if it is firing hot shells of explosive death.

Guns are a subset of cannon meant for flat, direct fire. As opposed to artillery, which fires in an arc.

Although to be fair in PS2 with the poor range and terrible drop of tank primary weapons, it probably is pretty accurate to call them "cannons" instead of "guns".

as usual chingles your posts are enlightening.

as for clips, magazines, bullets and cartridges even if you do know the difference and you are talking about a game and misunderstanding on anyone's part of the terms used won't affect the game or their ability to play the game (or anyone else's). it shouldn't matter if you aren't correct.

The most important part of using words is the context and the situation. if you are playing around in a game chatting with people you can use clip and magazine interchangeably unless you are being specific to real life which has no game based component in your discussion.

if you are talking in real life situations you should use the proper terms to avoid confusion(there are exceptions), but if you are talking about games the distinction between magazine and clips does not really matter the listener will understand your meaning even if it is not technically correct.

You could argue the same of a shotgun. if a police officer spots someone near a shooting that is carrying a shotgun and tells them to "drop the gun and put his hands up" while not technically correct anyone can understand his meaning, from the officers point of view is there any real point to changing the word used to be more specific when anyone can understand his meaning in that situation?

......gives up trying to post pictures onto this ******* **** forum.
Seriously its not hard to maintain a forum, FFS.