What's in a word?

Part of being a journalist involves fretting about words. At Shift, we've had multiple conversations pondering questions such as these: How does ride-hailing differ from calling a taxi? Can a rental company get into the car-sharing business? Is a vehicle self-driving if a human ever has to take control?

And what do you call the person sitting in the driver's seat of a self-driving vehicle if that person isn't doing anything to maneuver the vehicle?

In this new mobility era, the words we use today likely will change as the technology develops and gets into the public's hands. Such massive societal transformations come with struggles over communication, and it's not the first time the world has wondered what to say about these machines that move us.

We went through the Automotive News archives recently, looking for photos of futuristic, quirky concept cars to use in Shift as examples of what people in the past thought we'd be driving today. During our search, we found an old speech, taken from someone's desk, in a manila folder labeled "History." The speech was from 1963, and noted the many terms tried before society settled on the word "automobile."

"Horseless carriage" was common, but so was the simple word "machine." Autos, at least those that used steam, were also called "road locomotives." There was "buggyaut," "motocycle," "quadricycle," "mechanical carriage," "road carriage" and the plain descriptor "device."

In 1895, the French Academy, which works to defend the French language from foreign influence, approved the word "automobile," a combination of Greek and Latin roots. The New York Times wrote in 1899 that it hated the word "automobile," which the paper said "is so near to indecent that we print it with hesitation." We think the Times was joking, but in every joke there is a kernel of truth. The word "automobile" stuck. And somewhere along the way, so did the word "car," which appears to be short for carriage but also has roots in the Gaelic word "charbad," which the Romans morphed into "chariot."

We don't know what self-driving vehicles will be called in the future, because when all cars can drive themselves will anyone need to point out the self-driving part? We need a word that means something like "self-moving."

You know what would be a good one? Automobile. Too bad it's already taken.