When Your Car is “the Machine”

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Matthew from Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hello, Matthew. How you doing?

I am well, thank you.

What’s on your mind today, Matthew?

Well, when I was a boy, I remember my grandfather saying to me and my brothers, time to go out and get in the machine and go to the store.

And I thought, machine? What does he mean, go out and get in the machine?

It sounded, I don’t know, a little unnerving to me, the thought of getting in a machine.

Like the leaf blower or something.

Yeah, a time machine, perhaps.

So, you know, we walked out the back door of his house and out to the driveway and got in the car.

And I’ve always wondered, why would my grandfather call his car a machine instead of calling it an automobile or just calling it a car?

When would he have been born, do you think?

My grandfather was born in 1889.

Okay.

Oh, my goodness.

That kind of hits the sweet spot for that, Martha, doesn’t it?

It sure does.

And Matthew, I’m so glad you asked about this because I have a memory of being a very small child.

And my dad every once in a while saying, oh, I must have left it out in the machine.

And my little brother and I would just laugh and laugh because he meant the car.

And, you know, let’s go in the machine or should we take the machine or walk?

And what’s really interesting about the word machine is that you might not realize how many times we’ve used the word machine to talk about all kinds of different things.

In the 17th century, the word machine could be applied to ships and then later to horse-drawn vehicles or stagecoaches.

And in the 19th century, people used the word machine sometimes to refer to bicycles and then later motorcycles and sometimes aircraft.

You know, originally when people were talking about ballooning, sometimes they would talk about flying machines.

And then, of course, you have a political machine that controls a political organization.

So the word machine does a whole lot of different kinds of jobs.

But the one that you’re talking about is really fascinating because, as Grant said, that time period really hits the sweet spot.

If you look at novels from the early 20th century, say Dashiell Hammett writing in the 1920s, they often use the term machine to mean automobile.

You know, it was this new contrivance and a new use of the word machine.

Yeah, it’s interesting you mentioned, you know, machine being applied to things like maybe a horse-drawn carriage.

Because I was thinking that, you know, perhaps my grandfather called his car a machine because, you know, when he was a young man, I would assume he mostly got around by walking or perhaps on a horse or in a horse-drawn carriage.

And he would think of this newfangled mode of transportation as a machine as opposed to a horse.

Right. That would be the main machine in his life.

Unless he was working, say, with a sawmill machinery or something like that, he probably didn’t have many other very sophisticated, high-powered equipment in his life.

That makes a lot of sense.

So if he was born in the 1890s?

1889. Yeah. So he would have been in his 20s about the time that we first find this popping up in print in the early 1900s.

Yeah. That’s about the time the first motor cars were being, I guess, somewhat mass produced.

Yes, exactly.

All right. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for sharing that with me and my own children.

I may just say, hey, you want to go for a ride in my machine?

That’s right.

And they’re like, where’s the airplane, Dad?

All right.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Thanks, Matthew.

Bye now.

Sometimes it’s a memory of something your grandparents said.

Sometimes it’s something that your four-year-old brought home from preschool.

We’d love to hear the words in your lives.

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