Flivver

A flivver is an American slang term used during the early part of the 20th century to refer to any small car that gave a rough ride, esp. one that is small, inexpensive, and old. A contemporary term was a "Tin Lizzy" (referring to a Ford Model T).

The term started to go out of style by the late 1930s or early 1940s, replaced by the use of jalopy in the writings of John Steinbeck (In Dubious Battle, 1936) and especially by Jack Kerouac in On the Road (1957).

Examples

• From Free Air, a novel by Sinclair Lewis (1919):

To the Easterner, a drive from New York to Cape Cod, over asphalt, is viewed as heroic, but here were cars that had casually started on thousand-mile vacations. She kept pace not only with large cars touring from St. Louis or Detroit to Glacier Park and Yellowstone, but also she found herself companionable with families of workmen, headed for a new town and a new job, and driving because a flivver, bought second-hand and soon to be sold again, was cheaper than trains.

• From "You Can Make Out Their Voices" by Whittaker Chambers, New Masses (1931):

  Most of the men had driven over in flivvers.^[1]

• The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America, title of a 1937 book by Upton Sinclair
• From Brave New World, a novel by Aldous Huxley published 1932:

  Because our world is not the same as Othello's world. You can't make flivvers without steel — and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now.^[2]

• From To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel set in the 1930s by Harper Lee (1960):

  One night in an excessive spurt of high spirits, the boys backed around the square in a borrowed flivver, resisted arrest by Maycomb's ancient beadle, Mr. Connor, and locked him in the court-house outhouse.^[3]

• From the Wall Street Journal (2012):

  It was, first of all, an advertising construct, a fiction created by the oil and lodging industries in the early 20th century to coax Americans out on the road in their flivvers and Packards.^[4]

• From "It's Nice To Go Trav'lin" By Frank Sinatra:

And the Hudson River

Makes you start to quiver

Like the latest flivver

That's simply drippin' with chrome

• From "The Wild Years" by Ernest Hemingway (1962):

  The luge is the Swiss flivver.^[5]

• From "The green mile" by Stephen King (1996):

  He walked strong up the Green Mile to my office, and there he dropped to his knees to pray with Brother Schuster, who had driven down from the Heavenly Light Baptist Church in his flivver.

See also

• Tin Lizzy
• Decrepit car

References

1. Chambers, Whittaker (March 1931). "You Can Make Out Their Voices". New Masses.
2. Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World. London: Vintage, 2004 [1932], p. 193.
3. Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird
4. Neil, Dan, Wall Street Journal, September 24, 2012, page R2.
5. Hemingway, Ernest (March 18, 1922). "Flivver, Canoe, Pram and Taxi Combined is the luge, the joy of everybody in Switzerland". Toronto Star Weekly.