This is a forum, not a living history club. Different clubs/groups have different authenticity standards by which the members are expected to follow. On a forum this does NOT apply, & if anyone were to start getting personal on this forum in regards to what they consider right or wrong in regards to authenticity, then & would expect a moderator to step in & do something about that.
Well my friend, we're not speaking of folks who jump in unasked, telling somebody, "that ain't right". At least not in this forum. Sure folks may be given a friendly warning akin to "I have one of those and sometimes I get grief over using it".
No, most often such hurt feeling depend more, ...
on the way the question was asked.
What I mean is that when a person asks, "Is this [item] historically correct?" They are asking a valid question, and usually will get valid answers,
and they asked, ..., so yes it is alright to give them a response.
The problem is, often the person asking the question
didn't understand what they truly asked. We make fun of folks visiting a historic site that ask, "is that gun real", when they really want to know if that gun is a plastic mock up or an actually working piece. Another is "Is that fire real?" when what they should say "Is that fire just a showpiece or are you going to use it to cook and maybe do something else like make musket balls?"
So even among us, folks ask "Is this authentic" or "is this historically correct", which is a history question, but sometimes folks who do the asking fail to understand,
it's not a permission request. YET..., when folks get a "no" about the authenticity of their item, they somehow think they have been told, "You can't use that". Then they get all butt-hurt about it, and resent in some cases the very valid response(s) that were posted. So my neck knife is likely NOT something a English colonist would've worn, the knife itself is not very right either, so all in all not HC, but I wear it and I do use it, a lot. Another case-in-point, a fellow on a Facebook Page on trekking asked if the Pedersoli Frontier flintlock rifle was historically correct, and to what time frame. I pointed out that right out of the box it was pretty much a 20th century, full stocked, flintlock rifle, but sometimes people modify them a little or a lot. I also pointed out that he wouldn't get turned away from an event for carrying a factory bought unchanged version.
So while we poo poo so called stitch-Nazi's, the fault may sometimes be found in the question asked, not in the response.
LD
