> I see; I was not aware that there is a specific connection between Nazis and the "brownshirt" term,

I genuinely appreciate and commend your honesty about the fact that you didn't previously know that.

Separately, it's an unfortunate that even on this forum, the term Brownshirt has been watered down to the point that it's lost its Nazi association completely, much like other Nazi terminology that has been rehabilitated in recent years.

I basically encountered the term only once or twice, in my distant past and have used it maybe as many times. It is not popular.

A Google n-gram comparison of "nazi" and "brownshirt" shows the latter to be vastly rare compared to the former.

I just compared several terms associated with the Nazis: brownshirt,wehrmacht,luftwaffe,hakenkreuz. Their popularity is in the same ballpark.

Luftwaffe is showing a strange resurgence, having overtaken brownshirt.

Brownshirt was on a popularity rise since 1960, but has declined recently. It is now only about 3 times more popular than hakenkreuz, though, which I would think is pretty obscure.

I think people tend to be relatively reluctant to do a dictionary lookup on a rarely heard word that is made of two everyday English words like "brown" and "shirt" and which is easily explained as a fairly obvious metaphor.

> I was not aware that there is a specific connection between Nazis and the "brownshirt" term

...Uh huh. What, exactly, did you think it meant? You clearly had something in mind.

> I was not aware that there is a specific connection between Nazis and the "brownshirt" term

:-o

Too late, you're On The Record™. And this one goes into your permanent record, no getting out of this blunder.

Oh yeah? Well don't get too distressed. Did I happen to mention that I'm impressed?

To the contrary, they did the right thing by admitting their ignorance in not knowing that Brownshirt refers to a group of Nazis. So the record shows that they were willing to learn. That's something.

In fact, according to a Google ngram and books search, no such term can be attested prior to the rise of the Nazis. There was no single-word brownshirt, capitalized or not, and brown shirt (two words) wasn't used as any sort of idiom referring to an oppressive military though or anything of the sort.

It also seems that a two-word form Brown Shirt also saw some use (in reference to the Nazis).