And when’s the last time you actually “computed” anything?
Dear Word Detective: What is the origin of the word “cranking,” as in “cranking a car”? –Supriya Singh.
Thanks for a fascinating question. Granted, it may not look especially fascinating at the outset, but it will be, trust me. Pass the popcorn.
To “crank a car” means, of course, to start (or attempt to start) it by turning the ignition key or whatever. This starts the electrical starter motor, which gets the engine’s cylinders hopping and juices running and so forth, mumble mumble (I really know shamefully little about car innards), and, with luck, you’re off to the mall. No cranking (e.g., if the starter is busted or the battery is dead), no vroom-vroom. Car batteries, in fact, are rated according to their “cranking power” measured in amperes.
When we call the process of turning on the ignition “cranking,” we’re using a term held over from the days before electrical starter motors, when starting a car required inserting an actual crank (a long metal rod bent into an angular shape) into the front of the car and cranking the engine by hand until it started. Starting car engines in this fashion became obsolete by the 1920s, although my first car, a 1960 Citroën ID-19 passed down from my parents, actually had a handy backup crank you could use to start the car in case of a dead battery. That was a fabulous car.
Now the interesting part. “Crank” in this “start an engine” sense is one of a range of terms still in common usage even though the technologies that spawned them have profoundly changed, turning words whose logic once would have been obvious into linguistic fossils.
We speak, for instance, of “dialing” a phone number, although telephones with rotary dials have been obsolete for decades. Similarly, we “cc” interested parties when we compose email, usually oblivious to the fact that “cc” originally meant “carbon copy,” a duplicate of a typewritten letter made by sandwiching a thin sheet of carbon paper between two sheets of paper before typing the letter.
Although music today is usually distributed on compact discs, we still speak of artists releasing “records” or “albums” (from the likeness of early record sleeves, often containing several records, to photo albums). A person who repeats the same complaint is said to sound “like a broken record,” a reference to the days when delicate phonograph records could be scratched, causing them to skip and repeat. And we still speak of “dropping a dime,” meaning informing on or betraying someone to the authorities, even though coin telephones (let alone ones that cost a dime) are vanishing rapidly.
How is it I’m just finding your site now? Brilliant stuff!
I am old enough to have a good collection of vinyl LPs and young enough to have a pretty healthy stock of CDs. I refer to them all as “albums,” not from a stubbornness to keep alive an archaic term, but because I view the word “album” as simply meaning “a collection.” The basic definitions supplied by an online search of the American Heritage Dictionary and WordNet, though perhaps not as authoritative as some sources, support this view.
Now I’m REALLY depressed. I didn’t take to kindly to being faced with my 40th birthday, and now I have this to deal with.
I honestly thought this question was asking how the word crank (v) came to be applied to cranking a car, i.e. with a crank (n).
Do you mean to tell me that it is not common knowledge that the first cars had to be cranked? Doesn’t anybody watch “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” anymore?
Wow. I need to go lie down.
i was only needing to know what crack crank on my car means.
In the early 60′s I bought a 1940 2 door Delux Chevy coup. (For 50.00 dollars!) I was surprised to see that the grill design afforded a hole in which an old fashioned metal crank could be inserted. I lifted the hood, and sure enough, right there in the front of the engine block I could clearly see where the end of the crank would be inserted. I was both pleased and fasinated at the same time. It seemed that it had been 2o years (or so) since the manual crank had been used on cars.