American Cars in The British Commonwealth
The term "Yank tank" is also used in Australian and Canadian slang to describe these cars, but more generally to describe any American car considered to be large and unwieldy - including both classics (such as Cadillacs) and modern SUVs. The term entered the general vocabulary in Britain during the Second World War and especially the decade afterwards, when some American servicemen stationed in Britain imported cars from the USA. This happened at a time when American cars reached their largest sizes and most extravagant styling, leading to the term 'Yank Tank' in relation to these cars' bulk and unwieldy size on typically narrow and winding British roads. This difference was especially great because British cars of the 'Austerity Years' in the late 1940s and early 1950s were generally small, low-powered, with low equipment levels and constrained styling in comparison. The use of the term however no longer occurs in the UK.
Read more about this topic: Yank Tank
Famous quotes containing the words american, cars, british and/or commonwealth:
“An American cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say “Gentlemen” to the person with whom he is conversing.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.”
—J.G. (James Graham)
“Never forget that you are Germans. Never forget that you are Nazis!”
—Edmund H. North, British screenwriter, and Lewis Gilbert. Admiral Lutjens (Karel Stepanek)
“By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)