A type of bullet designed to expand or flatten upon impact, making it especially damaging; also used as an insult for a stupid person.
Named after Dum Dum, a district near Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, where such bullets were first manufactured by the British military in the 1890s.
What started as a place name became synonymous with a deadly weapon, and then the term got recycled as slang for a stupid person—showing how military terms sometimes become everyday insults.
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