fastback van
n.— «“What is it?” asked a judge for the Eyes on Design Awards as he contemplated the Chrysler ecoVoyager, a long blue capsule with a stubby front end grafted onto a minivan body. He and his fellow judges…stared and stared at the unfamiliar shape. Finally, their leader, Jack Telnack, former design chief for the Ford Motor Company, declared, “It’s a fastback van.”» —“Looking at the Slope of Things to Come” by Phil Patton in Detroit, Michigan New York Times Jan. 20, 2008. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Amy from Charlotte, North Carolina, reports a dispute arose when visiting her brother’s family. Is a large container for storing sugar properly called a can or a canister? The answer involves prototype theory, which in cognitive linguistics and...
In an electric car, the trunk is in the front, not the back. Automotive engineers refer to this part of the vehicle as the frunk, a portmanteau of front and trunk. For a while, the Jaguar company, which is based in the UK, instead called it the...