I've recently been reading some of the short stories of Dashiell Hammett featuring the Continental Op. These stories were written in the 1920s and are about a detective investigating crime in and around contemporary San Francisco.
I noticed that the characters frequently use the word machine to mean an automobile, and I wondered whether this was common usage for the time and place. I had not heard it before. To a modern reader, it has an archaic sound, as if the car were such a new development that there was not yet a specific word for it. But of course by the 1920s cars were very common, so this does not make sense. It may also be slang; given their criminal associations, Hammett's characters tend to speak mostly in slang.
Does anyone have more information about this usage and its history?
Best Answer
The Oxford English Dictionary's definition 5h of machine is ‘originally and chiefly U.S. A motor vehicle, especially a car.’ The first recorded use with this meaning is from 1901: ‘His assistant crouching at his feet out of range of the swift-flying currents of air produced by the mad flight of the machine.’ There is also a Hammett citation from 1929. The word seems to have been used in this sense throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
Machine is a versatile word. Remember the film 'Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines'? And when Windows is doing some housekeeping on my computer, I am told ‘Please do not power off or unplug your machine.’