Catoctin clarion. [volume] (Mechanicstown, Md.) 1871-1940, 1908-01-02

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"By what authority came the word
chauffeur to be foisted on an Eng
disappearing public?" The question
Is often asked privately and from
time to time some indignant pure
speech-loving enthusiast echoes the
same query through the columns OF
the daily press, with an appeal to the
potentate of the blue pencil to use all
his power and influence to extermin-
ate the foreign intruder.
There are about a dozen other
words, as foreign to the average man
ten years ago as ancient Greek, which
have gradually slipped into everyday
use until to-day they pass unques-
toned, and have, by their mere per-
sistence, earned place for them
selves in the latest editions of ma
tional dictionaries.
1t is one of the rules of life that a
nation which has the honor of intro
ducing anything new in any depart
ment of activity should impose its
own nomenclature. There are suffi-
cient examples in our own products
adopted by speakers Of other tongues
and allowed to retain their native
names to warrant accepting few
from outside. Because France got a
few years advance on the world in
the introduction of the automobile
she had to supply new set of terms
to cover the nakedness of her new
creation. Automobile" suggested
itself, nothing being simpler than the
combination of auto-self and mobile
moving. But before automobile
was allowed to pass as a substantive
it was used in connection with car
riage, the new vehicle being voiture
AS every noun in French must be of
either masculine or feminine gender
it had to be decided which class au-
tomobile should go into. AS voiture
is feminine some declared that auto
mobile should be of the gentle sex,
too; others took up the opposite side,
and an academic division was pro-
duced. Even now it Is not certain in
the land of its creation whether an
automobile Is "she" or "he."
"Chauffeur' is an interloper-an
interloper who cannot give one solid
reason why he should have been al
lowed to creep into the automobile
language. Before self-moving road
vehicles came into being chauffeurs
were found only on railroad engines,
steamships and stationary steam en-
gines. their duties being to feed their
charges with coal. Why the driver
of an automobile should have been
called chauffeur it is difficult to
understand, for his prototype on
steam engines had nothing whatever
to do with driving, that task being
left to the mecanicien, and even the
first automobiles, crude as they were,
had little in common with a stoke
hole.
The further one goes back the less
glorious is the ancestry of the chauf-
feur. In the dark days of the French
revolution armed bands took advan-
tage of the weakened executive pow
er to roam through the land and rob
all and sundry. A favorite method
of persuasion when the terrified ma
tives refused to reveal the spot in
which their treasure was hidden, was
to chauffe or burn the feet of the I'M
fortunates. Frequently, in those
cold winter nights the chaufferette
or bed warmer, was seized upon as
the convenient instrument of tor
ture. So extensive We're the depre-
dations of these bands that for a
time chauffeur and brigand were sy-
nonymous terms.
A garage Is merely shelter, with
nothing in its makeup to indicate
that it has any connection with auto
mobiles. The connection is easy to
see between garage and care, a rail-
road station. A garage line on the
railroad is merely siding; when it
was necessary to christen the home
of the automobile, it was more nat
ural that the locomotive should be
godfather and not the horse stable.
AS at present applied, chassis is
just little younger than the auto
mobile industry. In earlier days it
designated any kind OF wood or metal
frame, from a wooden cucumber
frame to the metal framework of a