English is a language that serves a purpose. Why not make it serve our purpose?
Why not? Because language is not there to serve 'our' purpose: is is there to serve the purpose of universally clear communication. While no-one would suggest that useage should never change with changing times, these changes usually gain credibility because they are useful and in fact
do serve the purpose of clarity of communication.
Why not use the term bullet heads?
A few reasons of many:
1.The word 'bullet' already exists. Unless, of course, 'bullet head' means 'the head of a bullet' (e.g. the pointy plastic bit of a Ballistic Tip), perhaps.
2. It is against the spirit of good useage to use two words wrongly where one used correctly will do
3. To complicate things further, a cartridge case actually
does have a head (where the headstamp is and from which the headspace is measured) whereas a bullet doesn't. In your terminology, a round would have a case head at one end and a bullet head at the other: is that a good thing?
4. If 'bullet head' means 'bullet', what does 'bullet' now mean? I suppose it is just a lazy slackers' term for bullet heads.
It allows RFDs to put 'bullet heads' on our tickets when we reload. This allows the firearms departments to understand that we have not exceeded our ammo allowance. I do not think that the staff in firearms licensing depts wound understand that term 'bullets' refers to inert projectiles, but they think that they would understand bullet heads.
What counsel of despair is this?
I suppose it is the Comprehensive 'education system' that encourages a tendency to approve of drift to the lowest common denomenator of ignorance; but to suggest that we collude in such wanton abuse of language simply because of the want of basic training among the FLD's clerical staff seems to me absurd. Even if one were so to collude, there'd surely be no reason for use of the ambigous terminology among firearms users?
In summary, it is bad useage which well as wasting words and betraying ignorance might cause misunderstandings, for example concerning 'head diameter'. The useage is to be deplored!
Just my humble opinion, of course!