"covered wagon", 1754, and not the American West

[Wilson Gray]

"Machine" for "automobile" is still hip in BE slang, as well as
"'chine," also used as a verb meaning, roughly, "drive like a maniac."

-Wilson

On Sun, Jul 6, 2008 at 12:25 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky
<zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "covered wagon", 1754, and not the American West
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Jul 6, 2008, at 8:39 AM, David Donnell wrote:
>
>> FWIW, "machine", or something that sounds like it, is the Persian
>> word I know for car/automobile...
>>
>> (Not sure how off-topic that is. At least it's a similar sense of the
>> word "machine".)
>
> OED has the 'automobile' sense (III.5.h), marked as originally and
> chiefly U.S.  it probably should be marked as now longer current.
> (the most recent cite is someone quoting his grandfather's usage, and
> the one before that has "machines" in a sense wide enough to take in
> tractors.  before that, it's Dashiell Hammett in 1929.)
>
> my pennsylvania dutch grandmother had this usage, back in the 40s and
> 50s.
>
> arnold
>
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