horseless carriage
Appearance
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Early term for an automobile, at the time it was common that carriages were pulled by animals, typically horses, but the automobiles were not.
Noun
[edit]horseless carriage (plural horseless carriages)
- (historical) An early automobile, of the types designed before World War I.
- Synonym: Brass Era car
- 1896 August, Popular Science Monthly[1], volume 49:
- The movement for the introduction of horseless carriages is represented by two periodicals, the Horseless Age and the Motocycle, in the United States; the Autocar, in London; and La Locomotion Automobile and La France Automobile, in France.
- 1918, Booth Tarkington, chapter VIII, in The Magnificent Ambersons, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, →OCLC:
- Fanny Minafer had begun to talk to Lucy. "Your father wanted to prove that his horseless carriage would run, even in the snow," she said. "It really does, too."
- (figurative) Something new and unprecedented interpreted in older and familiar terms.
- horseless carriage thinking
- 2018, Shoshana Zuboff, chapter 11, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:
- The basic operational mechanisms and business practices were so new and strange, so utterly sui generis, that all we could see was a gaggle of “innovative” horseless carriages.
Further reading
[edit]- horseless carriage on Wikipedia.Wikipedia