Mind your language

THANK you all (well, not all, but many) for writing to tell me the true origin of kick in. Everyone was very certain, but not everyone said the same thing.

Mr David Neligan wrote from Brussels to explain its origin from motoring vocabulary. 'A motor car with an automatic gearbox,' he says, `has a device whereby, when the driver depresses the accelerator sharply to speed up for overtaking, the gearbox shifts to a lower gear. This shift takes half a second or so, after which the lower gear "kicks in", resulting in a strong surge forward.'

Mr Tom Burkard from Norwich tells me that the phrase has been around in the United States since the 1950s in contexts such as: `When the turbo kicks in, this baby really takes off.' Again the kick is the sudden acceleration in a car `when the throttle is sufficiently depressed to engage either a turbocharger or the auxiliary barrels in a four-barrel carburettor'. Mr Burkard says it is also used by jet pilots of a similar surge when the after-burner is used.

A variation on this mechanical theme comes from Mr Andres Magnusson of the Morgunbladid newspaper in Reykjavik. `Before the invention of the automatic starter,' he writes, `engines had to be started with a crank, or a swift turn of the propeller as the case may be, until the engine "kicked in". Many motorcycles are still started in this way, and they can certainly give a kick, as a Finnish friend of mine can vouch for. She broke her leg when starting up her Harley.'

I shall decline the temptation provoked by the Magnusson connection to make some silly joke about started and Finnish, and move straight on to Mr Andrew Rosthorn, who writes from Paris. `The answer,' he says, `surely lies in "the wheel's kick and the wind's song".' He then spoils the reverie by suggesting that `when you clear harbour and steer your ship automatically, there is a momentary delay before the helmsman feels the automatic pilot "kick in". The two words perfectly capture the feeling of a stronger and steadier force taking over your helm.' Perhaps so, but I wonder what Masefield would have made of an automatic pilot.

(By the way, I notice that in the most recent edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations it is suggested that the reading 'I must down to the sea again' in the edition of 1902, instead of 'I must go down to the sea again', was a mere misprint. That will certainly be a blow to pedants of the kind who love to point out there is no the before Albany or MCC or Guildhall or Messiah.)

Dot Wordsworth

Copyright Spectator Jul 3, 1999
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