"Someone needs to tell the suburbanites who think this is a synonym for “badass” what the actual etymology is,"This caused some humor at SHOT Show that year and the holster's name was changed to the Hidden Truth. (It's still called the Pipe Hitter in at least one Amazon listing, though!)
This was all brought to mind again recently...
Yes, I know that "pipehitter" has entered VetBro speak as a synonym for "door-kicking face-shooter" but that doesn't change its etymology one bit. It originated from a Ving Rhames line in Pulp Fiction.
I know you’ll find this shocking, but the young men who run off to join our country’s special operations forces are a whole lot more likely to have been Eagle Scouts than they are to have smoked rock.
Hence, when they watched Pulp Fiction, they thought Marcellus Wallace wanted a couple of people who hit other people with pipes, not a couple callous junkies who would torture someone with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch in exchange for drugs. Thus the confusion of terms.
In the early days of the War on a Noun, suburbanite White dudes in SOF began misusing the slang they’d heard in a movie as teens as a term of respect.
The idea I've seen floated that Pompeo picked it up from his military service in the Eighties is ludicrous, but I've no doubt that he honestly doesn't know its meaning beyond the current VetBro one. He doesn't strike me as being familiar with drug patois of any variety. This doesn't make his request any less ludicrous, though.
The idea that Edna of The Villages in Florida becomes a "pipehitter" in the VetBro sense by mailing off a portion of her Social Security check to some grift-y sounding PAC to fight the Marxism is ridiculous, and you'd need to be hittin' the pipe pretty hard if you think most of that dough won't go to salaries and nice conference room furniture.
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