I was looking for a Tacticool on Boyds' website when I saw that the model appears to have been renamed the "Pro Varmint" sometime in the last month or so. It's a pretty good name, but I did kind of like the old one. The word "tacticool" was coined as a pejorative and still undoubtedly carries that connotation among people who'd use that term without irony, but that was what I liked so much about that name for the stock: it embraced what it unabashedly is. The Tacticool is a low-cost accessory that, while it might not perform as well as the more expensive accessories that it aesthetically mimics, does do everything the user could reasonably ask of it. Moreover, giving it a tongue-in-cheek name made it okay to like something tacticool as long as you knew it was tacticool.
I don't want to give it too much credit as a game-changer or paradigm-shifter or something equally patronizing and histrionic, nor do I want to sound too dolorous because Boyds is still offering the same rose by another name. Still, the change prompted me to reflect on a name that I know was not hugely popular but was, at the same time, quite appropriate.
