Terms Which Have Disappeared

[BlueTrain]

My son lives in L.A. and works in the movie business. We were talking the other day about how bad the traffic is where he lives and he mentioned how some presumably well-paid actors drive very ordinary cars because there's no point in having a high performance car when you can't really make much use of it. Of course, we may not all have the same idea of what an ordinary car is but he mentioned a Prius. He drives a pickup truck himself.

 

[Fading Fast]

On the above posts, I've never thought that much about a car's face, but the BMW Mini always looks to me like it has a cute face with chubby cheeks, which fits the car's overall personality.

As in LA, owning a high performance car in NYC is silly as you'd be lucky to get it out of second gear. That said, I see them all the time and, IMHO, they look like caged animals as these cars built for zero-to-sixty in three-odd second and top cruising speed well in the three digits crawl along avoiding potholes, pedestrians and the seven billion delivery trucks that come into the city every day.

 

[BlueTrain]

If you're looking at a car and thinking about what kind of face it reminds you of, you're overthinking it.

Where I live, it is still possible, on a good day, to blow off the gas-guzzling road-hogs with your $75,000 BMW and there are drivers who try to do that on their way home in the evening. But for some reason, you never see anyone in a Corvette doing things like that.

 

[EngProf]

You're not alone -- I've never cared for the chrome-coated "Insolent Chariot" era of the fifties and sixties either. They weren't even as popular in their own time as they are with collectors today, and that popularity is largely a generational nostalgia thing: the Boomer kids who grew up with those cars are the ones driving their current popularity. In another twenty years car enthusiasts will have forgotten all about tailfins and chrome and will be enthusing over the unique features of a 1974 Mazda RX-4. "Love the Wankel, baby!"

The closest thing to a real revival of fat-fender era design cues was the Chrysler PT Cruiser of the early 2000s, but everyone I knew who owned one says it was a lousy car.

I owned and drove an original 1960s VW Beetle, and the new Beetle ain't no Beetle to me. It's not a real Beetle unless you can see the generator sparking thru the engine cover louvers when you run it at night, and people flash their lights at you thinking the engine's on fire.

To set the record straight concerning Baby Boomers and the "chrome-coated Insolent Chariot era of the fifties and sixties", those were NOT the choice of the Baby Boomer automotive-enthusiasts (hot rodders). Those were more the cars that our fathers and uncles drove.
As the cliche goes, "do the math". The leading-edge Baby Boomers were born ~1946 and got their driver's licenses in 1962.
The 1948 group (my year) got our driver's licenses in 1964. (and so on...)
The cars we most wanted (then and now) were well after the chrome and tailfin era - with the exception of the 57 Chevy, which was a special case.
The last of the big-tailfin Chevy's was 1960. The pivotal year for Baby Boomer car-people was 1962, when the first of us started to drive. 1962: Chevy 409 and Mopar 413... Then we got GTO's in 1964, Mustangs in 1964 1/2, Camaros, 396 Chevelles, and all the rest in short order.
The cars we Baby Boomers wanted had not-much in the way of tailfins or chrome. They were light, high-powered, and relatively cheap. (To be honest, we felt sorry for the unfortunate ones who had to drive hand-me-down 1958 chrome-coated Bulgemobiles.)
As a second indicator, think of the Baby Boomer car songs: "409", "GTO", "Hey Little Cobra", "Little Old Lady from Pasadena" ("... parked in her rickety old garage was a brand-new shiny-red super-stock Dodge")

Those are the cars that now-rich Baby Boomer car enthusiasts are buying (for outrageous prices). I almost cried when I saw a classic-car auction and a 1962 Chevy 409 went for $125,000. I paid $500 (!) for the one I had way-back-when.

 

[LizzieMaine]

We didn't really have any such "car culture" in my part of the world, and didn't pay much attention to such things. But I do live next town over to one of the largest transportation museums on the East Coast, and I do follow their auctions each year. It's the tailfin stuff (and pickup trucks) that tends to bring out the boomer bucks around here. Make of that what you will, but it sure looks like nostalgia for childhood to me.

As far as I'm concerned I'm not fond of sixties car design either, although it's less offensive to my eyes than the High Fifties monstrosities. My grandfather, who worked on cars for a living for forty years, had little good to say for any car made after WW2. As for "Muscle Cars," they've always struck me as hilarious overcompensation, except maybe for the Mustang a friend's mother drove. In cases like that they were sort of a family "second car" for a family that thought they were better than a Falcon.

 

[EngProf]

We didn't really have any such "car culture" in my part of the world, and didn't pay much attention to such things. But I do live next town over to one of the largest transportation museums on the East Coast, and I do follow their auctions each year. It's the tailfin stuff (and pickup trucks) that tends to bring out the boomer bucks around here. Make of that what you will, but it sure looks like nostalgia for childhood to me.

As far as I'm concerned I'm not fond of sixties car design either, although it's less offensive to my eyes than the High Fifties monstrosities. My grandfather, who worked on cars for a living for forty years, had little good to say for any car made after WW2. As for "Muscle Cars," they've always struck me as hilarious overcompensation, except maybe for the Mustang a friend's mother drove. In cases like that they were sort of a family "second car" for a family that thought they were better than a Falcon.

If you didn't grow up with a car culture, as many of us did in the Southeast, Midwest, and especially California, the fine details probably wouldn't be as relevant.
I'm somewhat surprised that the fifties tailfin-stuff outdoes the sixties performance-stuff. Perhaps there is a connection between the lack of a highly-developed car culture there in the old days and what sells now.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

I was born in '47, got my licence in '63 and I, and most other Boomers, for the first 10 years at least, owned the car model known as "Used." My first was a beat-up Ford Falcon. I was devastated when my parents got rid of our red-and-white '56 Chevy Bel-Air. That's one used car I would have been proud to own. The first time I bought a new car was in '78, and I haven't bought another new one since. I buy used, drive them until they won't drive no more and look for another beater.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The first car I remember in our family was a white 1956 Nash Rambler sedan, which was ugly and lumpish, but it ran. Until the day my father tried to start it on a cold morning and cracked the block. We had a 1961 Chevrolet Biscayne sedan a few years later, until the brakes let go and my mother drove it into the side of a house. We had a 1964 Chevy Belair for a while after that, which had one of its doors nearly torn off when I opened it into traffic. And then a 1968 Ford something-or-other which caught fire in the driveway one afternoon for no particular reason. And finally a 1974 Ford Galaxie which got about six miles to a gallon until the sub-zero winter night the driveshaft fell off going up an exit ramp on I-95.

All thru all of this echoed the voice of my grandfather: "I never shoulda got rid of my '36 Chevy."

I've never even remotely considered the possibility of buying a new car. I've never even owned a car made in the 21st Century.

 

[GHT]

The first time I bought a new car was in '78, and I haven't bought another new one since. I buy used, drive them until they won't drive no more and look for another beater.

That's pretty much the British attitude. When you buy a brand new car here, you can more or less, expect to lose 25% depreciation as soon as you drive it out of the showroom. Back in 1991, my wife was looking for a decent car, we found a BMW 525I for ten grand, it was new in 1989 at a list price of twenty eight grand. It originally had been a company car, the finance director of some trading company in Central London. She kept that car for 14 years, only getting rid of it when the big bills started coming in.

 

[MisterCairo]

Buxom.

 

[Fading Fast]

Buxom.

that one has faded away.

 

[tonyb]

That's pretty much the British attitude. When you buy a brand new car here, you can more or less, expect to lose 25% depreciation as soon as you drive it out of the showroom. Back in 1991, my wife was looking for a decent car, we found a BMW 525I for ten grand, it was new in 1989 at a list price of twenty eight grand. It originally had been a company car, the finance director of some trading company in Central London. She kept that car for 14 years, only getting rid of it when the big bills started coming in.

I've owned what must be dozens of cars. In my teens and into my 30s a serviceable car could be had for a few hundred bucks, tops. (I paid less than a hundred for my first car, and at least one other that I recall.) So I'd drive 'em and fix 'em so long as the fix cost less than what I might pay for a replacement vehicle.

I've never owned a new car, and I doubt I ever will. Our household income would support such a purchase, but seeing how, as GHT notes, so much value is lost the moment the owner takes possession, I just can't justify the expense.

This household has need for a wheelchair accessible van. Those babes don't come cheap, especially new. So we buy used and hold on to them much longer than we would if they weren't modified. Our last one, which we owned for 11 years, got totaled by a distracted elderly fellow who plowed his Cadillac into the back of it at a fairly high rate of speed. It had only 201K miles on it -- not even close to worn out. When we bought that van, in spring of '05, it was eight years old and had covered all of 17,717 miles. Its replacement is 11 years old with 45,174 miles. We paid a bit more than we would have for a higher-mileage van, but I suspect we'll be money ahead by covering considerably more time and distance before it needs costly repairs.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

Oddly enough, in Shakespeare's time, "buxom" meant "obediant"or "biddable"(another obsolete word). I don't know how it morphed into the current "zaftig."

 

[LizzieMaine]

I prefer Aldous Huxley's term -- "pneumatic."

 

[BlueTrain]

Does anyone say "broad" anymore or "dame?" The former might not be perceived as flattering exactly but the latter should (but no doubt isn't) be perfectly correct, if somewhat slangy. The Germany word for lady is "Dame," after all, so it shouldn't be perceived as something rude. "Frau" is simply a woman or wife. I wonder, though, what women think of the word "perky," you know, like Doris Day used to be.

We actually owned a 1957 Chevrolet. It was a four-door station wagon. I think they were all two-tones and it had white sidewalls, I think. Although I did get to drive it once, I was never allowed to borrow the car. That was just as well as I had no money. Since then, I've owned a fair number of cars, some more or less memorable and some more or less reliable. I bought a car last December and it was new. I'd much rather buy a new car than an old one now. My wife is still driving her second Volvo, a 1998. It has been relatively troublesome, however, and we even replaced the engine. If I really can't go anywhere but work, I don't have much interest in a car anymore. Besides commuting to work, it's chief purpose is to play CDs.

 

[tonyb]

I occasionally use "broad," although I'm mindful of context.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Women in my age group and social class are known to use it when referring to each other.

 

[BlueTrain]

I am shocked, though there are worse words.

 

[tonyb]

Women in my age group and social class are known to use it when referring to each other.

Hard as some find it to believe, I don't set out to offend people. And while I am pathologically resistant to self-censorship, I find it just plain ill-mannered to address people in terms they would rather I didn't. (If that makes me PC, oh well, I'm PC.)

So, if broads would rather I not call 'em broads, I won't call 'em broads. But the broads you keep company with sound like kind of broads who don't object to being called broads. Speaking broadly, of course.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I occasionally use "broad," although I'm mindful of context.

It always reminds me of Baby Herman.