Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles Hi this is Tutor Nick P and this is Word Origins 64. The weird origin today is clunker. Okay. Let's take a look at the note here. A clunker is a very old and poorly maintained piece of machinery, especially a car. By extension so you know , even though we mostly use it for cars but sometimes by extension we can use it for other things. By extension it could also be used for anything that is not successful. Okay. Let's continue. The origin is believed to come from the sounds some old machinery may make when in use. The word clunk by itself is the sound made by one heavy object hitting something else. So you know, with a car, especially if it's driving down the road, you might hear clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk. So that's where the word ...this was the origin really came from that they referred to this old car that's not maintained well. As a clunker. Okay, Let's continue. The term seemed to appear in the late 1930s and 1940s which was towards the end of the Depression and wartime. Money was tight and many people probably did not have much money to maintain one's car properly. If they could afford a car or if they could afford one at all. Okay. Let's continue. Other words used for an old car in poor condition are jalopy. Yeah. They used jalopy, lemon. Lemon well lemon doesn't always have to be very old. It just means that a car that breaks down a lot. But usually that is an old car. A beater you know, it's beating along. Rattletrap. Yeah. It could like the car shaking around like different parts of the car shaking a lot. It's like rattling, a rattling noise. So kind of a similar idea. Rust bucket. Okay. Yeah. When the car is really old especially if it's in northern part of the country, a lot of the metal on the you know, outside surface of the car may start to rust. So sometimes they could be called a rust bucket too. Okay , good. Anyway here are several examples. Example number one. When he picked me up for a date. I couldn't believe he was driving a clunker. Yeah so there's always some jokes about this. Where you know, some girl maybe she doesn't want to get in the car if the car is too terrible looking. All right. Number two. When are you going to bring that clunker to the junkyard and get a new car . Yeah. Maybe some coworkers are teasing him. Or number three. During the Obama administration, he tried to stimulate the car industry by having a program called 'cash for clunkers' It was supposed to help, indirectly help the environment too, I think as you know getting rid of older cars that had poor gas mileage and buying newer cars that had better gas mileage. I don't know how well but it was questionable how well it really worked out. But that was the idea behind it but he kind of really brought back the word clunker again everybody was used to the word clunker during that time. Let's continue. Okay and here's the one use where we're not really talking about either a car or machine. You could say that movie turned out to be a real clunker. Clunker because remember I said here you know by extension it could be used for other things that's not successful as well. Anyway, I hope you got it. I hope it was clear. I hope it was informative. Thank you for your time. Bye-bye.
B1 US extension rust lemon rattling mileage origin English Tutor Nick P Word Origins (64) Clunker 13 0 anitawu12 posted on 2019/08/13 More Share Save Report Video vocabulary