JEEP again

[Jonathan Lighter]

The earliest vehicle to be called a "jeep" appears to have been the 1937
Halliburton truck. It does not appear in HDAS because it was a one-off
usage. (Perhaps that decision was an error.) Dave Wilton's 1938 discovery of
"jeep wagon" applied to a tank is number two.

IIRC, the 1/2-ton "jeep" was designed and manufactured by Dodge.  It was
commonly used in armored units (cf. previous paragraph); in such cases the
1/4-ton "jeep" was sometimes referred to as a "peep" or, very rarely, a
"beep."

The Wehrmacht also had a versatile Volkswagen command car of a somewhat
similar appearance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_K%C3%BCbelwagen


I believe that American soldiers referred to these too as "jeeps" because of
their resemblance to the American army vehicles.

HDAS relies on MW10's dating of jeep's application to a vehicle to
"1940,"the year of the car's design. I do not know what the source of the
presumed 1940 citation might be.

JL

On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 1:22 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: JEEP again
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 7:18 PM, Baker, John <JMB at stradley.com> wrote:
>
> > Thimble Theatre (as comics aficionados call it, though the strip at
> > this time usually ran under the title used today, Popeye)
>
> FWIW, "Thimble Theatre/Theater" (can't recall which spelling was used)
> and "?by? (I seem to recall "by", but perhaps not) B. Zaboly," with
> the _B_ drawn as a stylized honeybee, was being used in the Dallas
> Morning News about the time that I was learning to read. That couldn't
> have been much earlier than 1940. Bela "Bill" Zaboly took over the
> strip in 1938, I think, though I was barely old enough to be able to,
> at that date.
> --
> -Wilson
> –––
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> –Mark Twain
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org