Quote:
Originally Posted by Targan
I don't regard "spoor" as slang. Spoor is one of the old words used in hunting. Perhaps it might seem like slang now because it is a word rarely used in modern American English but it isn't a colloquialism.
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Targan,
Spoor is not an unused or even particularly rare term in North America, albeit it's normally used relating to hunting/tracking animals (hence Lee's comment about rednecks). What might make it slang in this context is applying it to the tracking and hunting of human beings during counter-insurgency operations, as it were. I'm sure the comparison of African guerrillas to animals hunted for sport is purely unintentional!
(Seriously, for all their faults the Europeans in Rhodesia were certainly more willing accept the principle of majority rule before the Apartheid-era South Africans, at least when their ship was going down.)
Tony