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82 years ago this morning about 3,000 Americans were killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. 

THIS DAY IN HISTORY: 
"The Blue Marble" Photograph Taken by Apollo 17 Crew (1972)
"The Blue Marble" is a famous photograph of Earth taken by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft while traveling toward the Moon in 1972. So-titled because the Earth resembles a blue marble—accented by swirls of white clouds—the image is among the most widely distributed photographs in history. Depicting a fully lit Earth, the snapshot was originally taken "upside-down," with Antarctica on top, but was rotated before distribution.

I've visited Pearl Harbor on two occasions and visited the Arizona Memorial, it's quite interesting overall.  The landscape of course is quite different today.  The USS Missouri Memorial is just down the way, I've yet to visit it.

The symbolism of placing the USS Missouri adjacent to the USS Arizona is interesting in multiple ways. 

You have the massive guns of the Mighty Mo overlooking and symbolically protecting the Arizona which remains a tomb for some of those who died 82 years ago this morning. 

You also have a message to potential aggressors. The Arizona is where the Japanese started the war on December 7, 1941 and the deck of the Missouri is the place where the humiliated Japanese signed the instrument of surrender four years later.

About half of the US deaths at Pearl Harbor occurred aboard the USS Arizona. 

What happened to the Arizona was something called a "catastrophic magazine explosion". An IJN shell carried as a bomb penetrated Arizona's deck armor and detonated the forward magazine. 

The term "catastrophic magazine explosion" is redundant because a magazine explosion is catastrophic by definition. Ships simply cannot survive them. HMS Hood met her demise in the same way as did a number of ships at Jutland a quarter century earlier.

I knew a guy in Medina who was at Pearl Harbor at the time of the attack. He was 17 and had lied about his age to enlist in the Navy. He was assigned to the USS California which sank beneath him that day. He swam through water covered with sometimes burning oil to Ford Island. 

After the attack he was reassigned to a Cruiser and sunk again at Coral Sea. In the first six months of US involvement in WWII he had been sunk twice. 

I have a lunch meeting today where we will be screening a documentary made by our local Cable TV about the aforementioned Veteran. 

One more note about him, just because I thought it was funny. By the time I knew him he was in his late 70's and looked like "grandpa" but one thing hadn't changed in the 60 years between the war and then. He still swore like a sailor. It was jarring because when you looked at "grandpa" you didn't expect that but when he opened his mouth he sounded like he was still in the Navy.

Great guy, passed away about 15 years ago.

Yup, these are just terms, to me.  Call it a banana if you want.  I like the term "battle cruiser", like in Star Trek.  It sounds, cool.

I don't see a good reason to argue over such terms.

I somehow missed this the other day.  I tend to agree with you on the futility of arguing about the terms but I can point you to some historical forums where you can read literally hundreds of posts arguing over what exactly is and is not a Battleship, Battlecruiser, or a "Large Cruiser".  

For the uninitiated, the Battlecruiser concept was born at a time when Battleships were large well armed and well armored ships but FAR too slow to actually force enemy cruisers into battle.  At the time Battleships typically could only obtain around 20-23 knots while typical cruisers were around 10 kn faster.  

Historically Battleships were usually built to what was called the "Balanced Battleship" concept.  That simply means that they were sufficiently armored to resist their own shells.  

Side note, All-or-Nothing Armor:
Originally Battleships were armored from bow to stern.  However, as guns got larger and more powerful it became impossible to build a ship armored from bow to stern against heavy guns that could also carry heavy guns and still be able to float and move.  To solve this riddle, Naval designers came up with the all-or-nothing armor scheme.  This meant that instead of providing armor for the entire ship, only the critical parts of the ship (magazines, engineering spaces, and enough buoyancy to keep the ship afloat) were armored.  The rest of the ship had virtually no armor at all.  This is why, for example, Wisconsin collapsed her entire bow in the 1950's.  There wasn't any armor up there.  

Back to the ships.  Battlecruisers were conceived largely to be able to take out enemy cruisers.  Battleships were more-or-less incapable of this since cruisers were so much faster so they could simply run away.  The general concept of a Battlecruiser was a ship with the armament of a Battleship and the speed of a Cruiser.  The idea was that it could destroy anything it couldn't outrun and outrun anything it couldn't destroy.  In order to accomplish this, armor was sacrificed.  

The only class of ships ever officially authorized for the USN as a Battlecruiser was the Lexington Class authorized in 1916.  Six ships were laid down but none were finished as Battlecruisers.  When the Washington Naval Treaty came into force the USN scrapped four without completing them and converted the other two into the Lexington Class Aircraft Carriers Lexington and Saratoga.  Lexington was sunk at Coral Sea, Saratoga survived the war and was sunk in the atomic tests at Bikini.  

As Battlecruisers the Lexington's would have had eight 16" guns and a 5-7" armor belt.  Compare that to twelve 16" guns and a 8-13.5" armor belt for contemporary USN Battleship designs.  What the Lexington's would have gotten for the reduced armor is a LOT more speed.  Contemporary USN Battleships had a top speed of 23 kn while the Lexington Class Battlecruisers would have been able to attain 33+ kn.  

At the Battle of Jutland both the Germans and the British used their Battlecruisers as effectively "fast battleships".  They wanted to use them because they had big guns like the Battleships but several of them exploded in the battle because they were not armored sufficiently to take on their own size shells.  This wasn't a design failure so much as a misuse.  The Battlecruisers had not been designed to stand in a line and slug it out with equivalently armed ships.  The designed intention was for them to run away from anything with equivalent guns.  In wartime practice the Admirals wanted as many big guns as they could get so all the big gun ships had to stand and slug it out even though the Battlecruisers were known to be incapable of actually doing this.  

Thus began the process of creating a "Fast Battleship".  The Iowa's (built ~20 years later) had armor comparable to the old USN Battleships AND speed comparable to the never-completed Lexington Class Battlecruisers.  

Here is a little tidbit that fits the "Weird History" topic of this thread:

The first shots at Pearl Harbor were fired by the USN and the first sinking at Pear Harbor was a small IJN Submarine being sunk by the USS Ward.  This happened a few hours before the main attack and I'm just typing the story from memory so details could be a little fuzzy.  

The harbor had a submarine net.  These were steel "nets" strung across the harbor entrance to prevent enemy submarines from getting into the Harbor.  This was already known to be important because in the early days of the European war a German U-Boat had managed to get into the British anchorage at Scapa Flow and sink the British Battleship Royal Oak.  

The Submarine nets had to be opened to allow friendly ships to get into and out of the harbor.  Early on the morning of December 7 a USN ship was entering the Harbor and lookouts reported that they had sighted a periscope and they believed that a submarine was attempting to get through the open net with them.  The Destroyer USS Ward was assigned to investigate and the USS Ward spotted and fired upon what they believed was a submarine.  The Ward dutifully reported this to the base.  

The PH base command obviously didn't take the Ward's report seriously.  If they had, the base could have been prepared for attack but it wasn't, why not?  

To understand this you have to understand a bit about the military.  It is typical in pretty much all militaries for the "career" guys to look down on the "reserve" guys.  In the USN, the career guys are almost exclusively US Naval Academy grads with (back then) a sprinkling of Ivy League guys mixed in.  They not only think they are smarter than the "reserve" guys, they also look at them as "weekend warriors".  The USS Ward was operated by a reserve unit from Minnesota.  Now if you've ever talked to a Minnesotan you know that they don't sound like Naval Academy/Ivy League guys.  

The USS Ward's Minnesota Naval Reserve crew got on the radio and probably said "We sunk a submarine, eh" and the Base Command which would have been all (or almost all) Naval Academy/Ivy League guys probably rolled laughing thinking that the "hicks" from Minnesota had shot a porpoise or dolphin.  So Base Command didn't take the notice seriously.  

Even after the attack and after the war a lot of people still doubted that the Ward had actually sunk a Japanese submarine early on the morning of December 7.  Decades after the attack the harbor entrance was being dredged and a miniature IJN Submarine was recovered.  The submarine had a 5" shell hole in the sail just below the periscope which was the size of Ward's guns and the place where the Ward's crew stated that they hit the submarine that nobody believed they had sunk all those years prior.