Hammett's Language

[stoutfellow]

I have learned a thing or two, reading the Dashiell Hammett collection. They're minor things, but I've found them to be interesting.

1) The stories were written beginning in the early 1920s, continuing to the end of the decade. In the earlier stories, Hammett (or his narrator) refers to automobiles exclusively as "machines"; "automobile" makes an appearance around mid-decade, but "machine" continues to be used intermittently. Most of the stories have the same, nameless, narrator, so we don't have a problem with change of voice here. The only other situations where I've seen that usage have been in songs: Johnny Cash's "One Piece at a Time" at one point refers to his creation as a "mo-chine" (sic), and Jan and Dean refer to "the whine of that screamin' machine" in "Dead Man's Curve".

2) In one of the stories, the narrator, speaking to another character, uses the word "Schrecklichkeit" ("frightfulness"), in reference to one of a series of nasty pranks (here, the killing and roasting of a dog). To the best of my memory, I had previously encountered that word only once, in a popular history of World War II, in reference to the bombing of Rotterdam. (The savagery of the bombing was much exaggerated by Western propaganda; the book went along with this.) I assumed that the word had been used at the time of that bombing, and that any use of the word by an Anglophone would be an allusion to that or similar incidents (e.g., Coventry). So what was it doing, being used in the '20s? A check of Wikipedia reveals that the word was used in connection with (supposed) German atrocities in Belgium in WWI; the Wikipedia article makes no mention of Rotterdam. Perhaps my memory is at fault....

Comments

[mmegaera]

I have another datapoint for "machine" as a term for an automobile. In Elizabeth Enright's Melendy books, a series of children's books written about and set in the time of WWII, there is an older woman, a family friend, who loans the family her car after they move out to the country. She refers to it as the Machine (with the capital letter). I remember thinking it was a very odd thing to call a car when I was about nine. But then I also found it rather strange when the little boy of the family referred to his precious prewar metal cars, too. I kept wondering if someone had misspelled pewter.