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April 2009 | Home
U-M HERITAGE »
Hard times
What happens to students' values when the economy tanks?
Sports »
Lucky man
Jim Abbott became one of U-M's best and most beloved athletes, despite playing with only one hand.
Most emailed stories
- Exactly how much housework does a husband create?
- U-M Heritage: How to date women, circa 1943
- University of Michigan 2008 Graduation (Story and Video)
Ideas
Toward the end of paper
What does it mean when newspapers no longer publish on paper, and books aren't made on presses?
Health
Intense bladder cancer treatment does not improve survival
Patients who receive more tests and intensive treatments do not seem to survive longer than patients with milder interventions.
TALKING ABOUT WORDS »
Car names
Detroit's troubled auto industry has done more than build vehicles. It's also come up with a trunk-load of car names.
TALKING ABOUT MOVIES »
M-ollywood
Michigan is trying to turn itself into a mecca for moviemakers. So far it seems to be working.
Car names
April 14, 2009
Michigan just celebrated a hundred years of making cars, and now the automobile business is spiraling in decline. The fastest and most expensive production car ever, the Veyron, has just come onto the market, but it is not made here. (Forbes published an article about the kind of car you get for $1.5 million.) There aren't so many cars made here at all.
Imagination produced wonderful vehicles in Michigan. Some were named for the moguls who brought them to market: Olds, Ford, Dodge. Michigan was also home to imaginative word coiners whose task was to give us ways of talking about them.
Other vehicles came with names that earlier had been applied to horse-drawn carriages: Brougham, Phaeton, Landau. Names like these became particularly popular when horse-drawn vehicles were mostly gone but their aura of elegance remained.
There's a lot of cultural history in names for cars and the advertising campaigns organized to sell them.
Early explorers were often picked out for celebrity: DeSoto, LaSalle.
Birds, particularly the carnivorous ones, were popular too: Condor, Eagle, Falcon.
Similarly big cats: Cheetah, Cougar, Jaguar.
And horses: Charger, Mustang, Pacer.
And snakes: Cobra, Sidewinder, Viper. (For obvious reasons, there's never been a rattler.)
Mythical creatures: Firebird, Thunderbird, Phoenix.
Heavenly bodies: Comet, Nova, Galaxy.
Weapons with sharp edges: Cutlass, Excalibur, Lesabre.
Races: Daytona, Grand Prix, LeMans.
One might easily imagine that men were the sole purchasers of certain cars and that they wanted to be kings of the road: Challenger, Ram Charger, Roadmaster. A whole family of muscle cars was marketed in order to accelerate testosterone. Take the Fury, for instance.
Long ago, places in Michigan produced cars that bore their names: Ann Arbor, Oakland, Pontiac.
Then car-making went global. Now many of the local names have vanished, and the industry seems to be going away too.
is Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. His latest publication (co-edited with Colette Moore and Marilyn Miller) is an edition of a chronicle of daily life in London written by a merchant in the middle of the sixteenth century. This electronic book incorporates images of the manuscript, a transcript of the writing it contains, and a modernization of the text for easy reading. Thanks to the University of Michigan Library and the University Press, the work is freely available to all: www.hti.umich.edu/m/machyn