Foot faults
Sir: To judge from press reports, we are confronted with an epidemic of people `shooting themselves in the foot'. Even Paul Johnson had the Labour Party doing it after the Lawson-Thatcher affair (The `It's understandable, yes, but what would happen if we all went round shooting the first Father Christmas we came across?' press, 4 November). People shoot themselves (accidentally, it seems) all over the place. In the ranks of the medical profession, Dr Ian Reekie shot himself in the foot over doctors' pay in the Daily Telegraph on 20 October, according to a subsequent letter from R. P. Morgan of Milford, in that same journal. In Time (page 30, 30 October) Boris Yeltsin, one- time Politburo member, broke new ground by being shot in the foot by the Russian Minister of the Interior although 'the finger on the trigger was his own'.
I always thought that, originally, 'foot- shooting' was intentional self injury, not an accident as it now is portrayed. It was practised by infantry in the 1914-18 war, who thereby became casualties for evacua- tion from the nightmare of mud in the trenches.
Has increasing by common misuse altered the original meaning?
Spencer Jones
8 Lower Blackhorse Hill, Hythe, Kent
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