Suicidal maniacs and cowering sissies
The origin of "car" and how it has divided humanity into two classes - plus me.
Last week I spent a day performing a ritual that plays a central role in the lives of people in New Zealand. At 6am I set off full of childlike hope and wonder from the country’s largest city, Auckland, to drive the 650 or so kilometres to our capital, Wellington.
On such a trip, three activities are more or less compulsory. One is listening to trashy music at full volume. My interest in new music began drying up by the time I was 30, so my go-to on long trips are playlists from the 70s and 80s, which, happily for me, were the heyday of trashiness.
Just listen to Me and You and a Dog Named Boo and tell me that ain’t so.
On my better days I may also squeeze in something worthwhile, often on the recommendation of my dear friend John, whose taste in music is broader and more sophisticated than mine. So it is that I have now discovered contemporary composer Nicholas Lens who collaborated with Nick Cave on the gorgeous 2020 album L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S. Lobo, eat your heart out.
The second compulsory activity is swearing at other drivers who are, to a person, either suicidal maniacs or cowering sissies who think the accelerator is actually a detonator switch connected to a bomb under the driver’s seat. Other optional objects of one’s expletive-laden anger – all of which I’m proud to say I turned to (and let me emphasise, this is a partial list only) – include the criminal lack of passing lanes, the inconvenience caused by road works that are addressing the criminal lack of passing lanes, trucks, buses, other lumbering behemoths, the hot coffee that I’ve just spilled over my freshly ironed shirt, or myself for once again imagining it would be a good idea to drink hot coffee while driving.
The final compulsory activity, at least for the solo driver, is thinking. It’s something I particularly enjoy when I’m on my own, since I don’t have to deal with the irritating presence of other people’s differing – ie, stupid – views on the subject at hand.
At some point (just south of Turangi as I recall) I got to thinking about this little word car. Where did it come from? I asked myself. Did it spring into the world fully formed soon after Henry Ford wheeled the first Model A or T or whatever it was off the production line? Is it a contraction of something? What happened to the far more evocative horseless carriage? And while we’re at it, whatever happened to Ford Models B, C, D et al?
My brain cogitated on the matter for a bit before adjudging that car is probably a contraction of carriage. “Good thinking,” I said, reassuring it that verification from an independent source would not be required for us to agree that this view was undoubtedly correct. I’m sure my brain would have had more to say if it hadn’t been distracted just then by a suicidal maniac in a police car gradually overtaking me in the passing lane.
A later surreptitious check on etymonline.com confirmed that car is, indeed, related to carriage. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg (aren’t you glad you asked?).
Car’s origins can be traced all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European root kers-, which meant “to run”. From it we get a host of words including not only car, but career, cargo, caricature, cark, carpenter, carriage, carrier, carry, charabanc, charette, charge, chariot, concourse, concur, concurrent, corral, corridor, corsair, courant, courier, course, currency, current, curriculum, cursive, cursor, cursory, discharge, discourse, encharge, excursion, hussar, incur, intercourse, kraal, miscarry, occur, precursor, recourse, recur and succour. If that’s not impressive, I don’t know what is.
Until 1400, carriage referred to the act of carrying. Then some bright soul saw it would also be a useful word for objects with wheels. By 1706, the predominant sense of carriage had become “horse-drawn, wheeled vehicle for hauling people”. Then George Stephenson developed a useable steam train, and around 1830 the abbreviated railway cars were born.
The Rocket, built by George Stephenson’s son Robert in 1829.
As for the horseless carriage, the first of them arrived on the scene in the early 1800s, well before the first railway car. That’s because the steam engine was already in use by then in factories and mines, pumping water and hauling wheeled vehicles loaded with coal and, given the abysmal safety practices of the time, probably expired miners as well. By the time Henry Ford arrived on the scene, horseless carriages had been in existence for well over a century.
Horseless carriage is what’s known as a transitional term – that is, a name for a new technology that’s a variation on the name for the old technology. Wireless telegraph, an early name for radio, is another example. Now before you start scoffing at your forebears’ lack of imagination, remember that your children’s children will someday laugh at you for calling that multipurpose device in your pocket a smartphone.
As you’ll no doubt be aware, the emergence of EVs and their promise of a cleaner, less climate change-y future is a hot car-related topic right now. The optimists, among whom I count myself, think this is a wonderful development. The sceptics, who may be right for all I know, see a mountain of expired lithium-ion batteries cluttering up the planet and making a greater, more toxic mess than all the CO2 emissions we avoided in the process.
One thing I’m confident many sceptics have got wrong, however, is assuming that the limitations of EV technology today will still exist in the future. Most new technologies start off – almost by definition – as mere shadows of what they’ll become. Consider the original internal combustion engines or the first mobile phones or early TVs. Anyone who believed they were as good as they were going to get was quite frankly clueless about what humans are capable of.
So it will be with EVs.
That’s what my brain says, anyway. And if there’s one thing I almost never do, it’s disagree with my brain.
The best car safety device is a rear-view mirror with a cop in it.
Dudley Moore