Ken Rogers takes a look at some of the linguistic gems cars have contributed to our collective vocabulary over the years.
A few years back, car-makers came over all coy about the word ‘estate’. It was about the same time they discovered the term ‘young, active lifestyle’. Instead of estate cars we were offered an absolute shedload of Tourers, Tourings, Avants, Sports Tourers, SWs, Variants and Sportbacks.
Nowadays, the buzzword is ‘Crossover’ – a term that entered the lexicon some time after ‘4×4’ (most commonly pronounced ‘fourbeefour’) simultaneously gained fame and stigma. A Crossover can combine some of the useful and some of the useless features of an estate (or Tourer), an MPV and a 4×4. Currently, Crossovers are highly fashionable and one of the most popular is the oddly-named Qashqai – which surprises some people. Crossovers are said to suit people with a young, active lifestyle. Just to declare my interests, I do not have a young, active lifestyle – but that doesn’t necessarily make me a bad person.
Over the years, many new words have been coined, added to the motoring dictionary and linked to popular culture. The car has featured strongly in popular songs – perhaps most memorably by Frank Sinatra who alluded to his reincarnation from being a car in a previous life, when he sung: “I have been a Rover”.
Then there are car names. We’ve always been led to believe that car manufacturers go to great lengths – and mega-expense – to ensure they give their new tin box a name that will convey the right image for the product, and not mean something rude or silly in any of the markets it’s likely to be sold in. I wonder how much Nissan paid someone to check out that ‘Cedric’ was a moniker that would inspire buyers when it first launched its big saloon? In Japan, Cedric soldiered on under that name until 2004 when its replacement was announced – called the Fuga. Japanese car-makers have always been world-class when it comes to wacky car names for their home market. Such names include the Mazda Bongo Friendee, the Isuzu Mysterious Utility Wizard – and of course, the never-to-be-forgotten Nissan Pantry Boy Supreme.
You or I might think it would be pretty safe for a manufacturer to opt for a combination of letters and numbers – like, for example, BMW 320d, Mazda 626, Audi A5, and so on. Wrong! Lancia’s people managed to screw-up a few years back when they called a classy little hatchback the Y10. Inevitably, it became known as the White Hen…
It’s hard to say exactly when ‘eco’ (pronounced eeko) slipped into the motoring lexicon – or exactly what it means – although it’s used a lot nowadays. According to WikiAnswers, eco is used as a prefix for words that relate to ecology or to the environment. If you find products or merchandise using ‘eco’ in the name, it “usually means it’s environment friendly,” says the website. In the motoring context it can also relate to economy – as in ‘let’s eke-out our last few drops of fuel’.
The ‘environment’ agenda has led to the influx into the motoring bible of numerous new words, abbreviations and acronyms. Until about ten years or so ago, you would have been hard-pushed to find the term ‘CO2’ on any vehicle specification or data sheet. Now it’s ubiquitous – whatever that means. The irony is that there are still a great many people completely unaware that the ‘CO2 g/km’ calculation can be directly extrapolated to ‘mpg’ – with a change in formula according to whether we’re talking about petrol or diesel. The CO2 g/km figure is in fact the weight of CO2 derived from fossil fuel (petrol or diesel) per kilometre driven according to the ‘official combined mpg’ cycle. A further fact is that the official combined mpg is not arrived at by precise, physical measurement of the volume of fuel used by a car on the test rig. The figure is usually arrived at by using an exhaust gas analyser to measure the weight of carbon dioxide generated by burning the petrol/diesel used to drive the appropriate cycle on a rolling road. The ‘g/km’ figure is then converted to miles per gallon (or litres per kilometre) using the previously mentioned formula for petrol or diesel. While I’m shamelessly digressing – but still on the subject of CO2 – why is it that when some people talk about carbon dioxide, they unthinkingly refer to it as a ‘pollutant’? Man-made emissions of CO2 may – or may not – be a cause of climate change, but it is not a pollutant. It’s a natural component of the air that we breathe and that plants absorb. It’s only a pollutant when it gets up the noses of over-zealous eco-warriors…
Words on wheels that make it to tabloid headlines tend to polarise – for want of a better word. They also tend to gather other words or phrases in a form of mutual support. Tabloid sub-editors like terms like ‘gas-guzzlers’. They like ‘gas-guzzling 4x4s’ even more, irrespective of the fact that by no means all fourbeefours are gas-guzzlers. Make that ‘Gas-Guzzling 4×4 Mums on School Run’ and you’ve the whole story in the headline. Why let the facts clutter up the picture?
A similar thing has happened with the word ‘hybrid’. According to much of the mass-media, all hybrids are greener than Robin Hood’s tights and are driven either by people with beards and open-toed sandles or by well-heeled hollywood celebs seeking an environmentally-responsible image. In fact, there are a number of hybrids that guzzle far more gas than many diesel-engined 4x4s…
China is the world’s fastest-growing car market, but the Chinese have yet to seriously join in the automotive word game. However, their manufacturers have given themselves some wacky names. For example, there’s Dadi Auto, Geely, Gonow Auto and Yunque for starters. Of course, their mass-motoring culture is all very new. Until very recently, your average, working-class Chinaman considered he could hold his head up high in front of the neighbours if he could afford a bike with a bell on the handlebars. Give him a few years and I guarantee he’ll become as well aware of the nuances of the company car park and suburban driveway and all of their aspirational complexities and angst as we are.
Dedicated aficionados of the car and its internal combustion engine are often referred to as ‘petrol-heads’ or ‘diesel-dudes’ – will electric vehicle fans be known as ‘current-heads’? Only time will tell…
