Van?

VW bus ownership comes with a few guarantees. One of these is that your bus will get attention from strangers, including purchase offers, various hand signals, and notes on the windshield. I suspect there are two main reasons for this: because they have a whole sub-subculture built around them and because they--both splitties and bays--look really weird.
Another guarantee is that occasionally someone will refer to your bus as a van. Curiously, a lot of owners get really angry about this. I've not been able to quite figure out why. I'm generally willing to let it slide, perhaps because I've been known to refer to Ludwig as a van and not a bus myself.
But most curious of all was the fury some ACVW freaks aimed at Chrysler a few years back when they mentioned, in an ad, that they'd invented the minivan in the mid-1980s: "Didn't VW invent the minivan in 1949?" Yet some of these same folks get wound up when someone refers to their pre-1980 bus as a van. 
I try to avoid delving into philosophy too much on this blog, but here goes: Whatever old VW Type IIs are or aren't, minivans are a type of van. Therefore as a Type II aficionado you can either get mad at Chrysler for making false claims of precedence, or you can get mad when people call your ride a van, but you can't get mad for both reasons (of course, you can also fail to get mad at all).
For what it's worth, I promise Ludwig won't be upset if you call him a van.