Brit slip.
Having now progressed to rereading Raymond Chandler novels that I'd previously only read once, I've stumbled across a Briticism that escaped my notice the first time around.
Towards the end of The High Window (1942), Philip Marlowe says:
"It was three o'clock in the afternoon and there were five pieces of luggage inside the apartment door, side by side on the carpet. There was my yellow cowhide, well scraped on both sides from being pushed around in the boots of cars."
-- p. 197 (the opening of Chapter 35) of the 1976 Vintage Books (Vintage Book Number V-141) edition
"Boot," of course, is the British term for an automobile trunk; given that Chandler "spent most of his boyhood and youth in England," it's perfectly natural for him to slip the occasional British term into his writing, even when writing a first person narrative related by an American character. But I am surprised that Chandler's editors at Alfred A. Knopf (who first published The High Window) didn't catch it. This suggests the possibility that some Americans, at least, used "boot" to refer to an auto's trunk, or that the editor felt a bit insecure about the American tongue, as it were, and was ready to defer to the British standard.
The most likely explanation is that it's a simple goof, of course; rather like Richard Nixon, in the Alan Moore-scripted comic book miniseries The Watchmen, telling Henry Kissinger that he will not be "pressurized" instead of "pressured"; I'd be willing to bet the price of a burrito that Tricky Dick never used a Briticism in a moment of stress in his life.
Towards the end of The High Window (1942), Philip Marlowe says:
"It was three o'clock in the afternoon and there were five pieces of luggage inside the apartment door, side by side on the carpet. There was my yellow cowhide, well scraped on both sides from being pushed around in the boots of cars."
-- p. 197 (the opening of Chapter 35) of the 1976 Vintage Books (Vintage Book Number V-141) edition
"Boot," of course, is the British term for an automobile trunk; given that Chandler "spent most of his boyhood and youth in England," it's perfectly natural for him to slip the occasional British term into his writing, even when writing a first person narrative related by an American character. But I am surprised that Chandler's editors at Alfred A. Knopf (who first published The High Window) didn't catch it. This suggests the possibility that some Americans, at least, used "boot" to refer to an auto's trunk, or that the editor felt a bit insecure about the American tongue, as it were, and was ready to defer to the British standard.
The most likely explanation is that it's a simple goof, of course; rather like Richard Nixon, in the Alan Moore-scripted comic book miniseries The Watchmen, telling Henry Kissinger that he will not be "pressurized" instead of "pressured"; I'd be willing to bet the price of a burrito that Tricky Dick never used a Briticism in a moment of stress in his life.