Co-efficient of Drag
If you want to cop some abuse from fellow motoring journalists during the launch of any new vehicle, just ask for the vehicle’s co-efficient of drag. The car company executives will respond with something like ‘‘0.29’’ but the fellow journos will respond with far more descriptive words such as ‘‘dork’’ or ‘‘poser’’.
That’s because the dumb question is probably either holding up the opportunity to drive the car, or go to dinner, depending on what time of the day it is. Cd is such a meaningless term, you see. It’s used to try to quantify the drag caused by an object in a fluid environment such as air or water. Apparently a cube has a Cd of 1.05, while a teardrop shape has a Cd of 0.04. So your average vehicle is somewhere in between. That means terms such as ‘‘slippery’’ or ‘‘bulky’’ are probably better descriptives.
And that probably doesn’t matter either because every vehicle’s new owner requires such things as window wipers, side mirrors and mud flaps, and installs such extras as roof racks and radio antennas, all of which ruin the Cd anyway. So in the motoring sense, let’s restrict ‘‘drag’’ to drag-racing.
Game-changer
This phrase is on the don’t-touch list because a motoring journalism colleague of ours once over-used it. Every new car he drove was a game-changer, or so it seemed. But no new vehicle is so good that it represents some pivotal moment in the history of the motor industry. It might have some flash new features but it won’t be a game-changer.
It’s always amusing how words and phrases get over-used in journalism. Right now every weather story seems to contain the phrase Big Dry, and you can guarantee that when winter comes and it rains a lot, we’ll start to be saturated with the phrase Big Wet. Or when it gets cold, Big Chill. So we’d much prefer that the term game-changer is reserved for sport. If someone scores a runaway try that changes the course of a game, then that’s a game-changer. Not when a vehicle’s got a new CVT transmission.
Moist
First question: Why would you want to use the word moist in a vehicle review anyway? Well, the answer might be to describe a wet windscreen because the air conditioning doesn’t work properly. Or to describe the weather outside, maybe?
It doesn’t matter because moist seems to be highly inappropriate. Do you know that surveys show it is one of world’s most hated words? Some time ago, a leading US magazine ran a poll that asked readers to nominate a word to scrub from the English language. There was overwhelming support to get rid of moist. Apparently it’s all because, unless you are discussing the moistness of a lovely piece of cake, if you add moist to an innocent sentence it makes it sound dirty. And we certainly don’t anything dirty to be associated with our vehicle reviews. Unless we’re talking about all the mud on a vehicle’s flanks, of course. Especially if said mud is still – ahem – moist.
Parallel park
Recently I was asked to write a piece asking why men always laugh when women try to parallel park. I refused on the grounds that no matter how I wrote the article, I would be accused of sexism. In other words, I was too scared to write it.
Equality of the sexes is at its best when it comes to parallel parking - women and men are equally useless at it. I know I am. I find it extremely difficult to do the reverse S-weave into a space between two parked cars. So I don’t do it. I simply carry on driving until I find a parking spot