Flivver: The Other Nickname of the Model T

Most people know the Model T as the Tin Lizzie, and the long argument over where that name came from is laid out in the Tin Lizzie story. Flivver is the other name, the one that has faded more, and in some ways it is the more revealing of the two.

A word for a flop, before it was a flivver car

Flivver did not start with Ford. Dictionaries class it as an Americanism from about 1905 to 1910, with an origin nobody has pinned down. In its earliest known sense it had nothing to do with machines at all. A 1907 item in the Ledger-Star of Norfolk, Virginia, used it to mean a failure, and the slang is said to have come out of the theater, where a flivver was a show that died. A 1909 paper put it in four words: "A flivver is a fizzle."

That is a hard word to hang on a product. A flop, a fizzle, a dud. And yet within months it was attached to a car whose touring model sold for $850 at its 1908 launch when most cars cost $2,000 or more. The word did not stop meaning "failure" when it found the Ford. It simply widened. The dictionary sense today still covers both: a small, cheap car, and anything of inferior quality.

How the Ford became the flivver

The Elyria joke works because it plays both meanings at once. The Ford did not explode because it was a flivver: a dud, a thing that does not go off. A reader in 1909 got the pun instantly, which tells us the word was already common slang before the Model T was a year old.

Within a few years the pairing was fixed. "Ford Flivver" turns up as routine newspaper language, for instance in the Brooklyn Daily Times in 1915. By then the Model T was everywhere, and Ford was building hundreds of thousands a year. A word for a cheap, unglamorous car found the most common cheap, unglamorous car in the country, and it stayed there.

The two nicknames worked differently. "Tin Lizzie" had affection in it, a name you might give a horse or a cousin. "Flivver" was closer to a shrug. It said: this car is nothing special, and everyone knows it. That the car kept selling anyway is the part of the story that matters. Owners could laugh at their cars, and the jokes about them became a genre of their own, a subject explored at length in the Model T jokes.

The flivver goes into politics

A nickname that well known could be turned on the man who built the car. In late 1915 Henry Ford chartered the liner Oscar II, soon known as the Peace Ship, and sent a private delegation to Europe in the hope of starting talks to end the war. It sailed from Hoboken on December 4, 1915, and drew ridicule from the start; Ford himself left the mission a few days after reaching Norway. A 1916 cartoon titled "Ford's Flivver Cure" mocked the venture, and Theodore Roosevelt called it a "jitney peace junket."

Both jabs used the car to mock the man. Flivver and jitney were the cheap car words of the day, and attaching them to a peace mission was a way of saying it was cheap, flimsy and bound to break down. It is a sign of how far the Model T had spread that a cartoonist and a former president could reach for its nicknames and be sure everyone would understand.

"You can measure how deep a car got into American life by how freely people insulted it. When Roosevelt could mock Ford's politics with a word for his car, the Model T had stopped being a product and become part of the language."

Patrick Walsh

Ford takes the name for itself

The strangest chapter belongs to Ford. On July 30, 1926, Henry Ford's 63rd birthday, the company unveiled a small single-seat airplane designed by Otto C. Koppen. It was called the Flivver, after the car slang, and it was promoted as the "Model T of the Air." The idea was plain enough: Ford had made the automobile cheap, and now it would try the same with flying.

Only five were built. On February 25, 1928, test pilot Harry Brooks was lost off Melbourne, Florida, flying one of them; the fuel vents had been blocked by toothpicks. Ford then halted its light-plane work. The Flivver plane did not become the Model T of anything.

Still, the choice of name says a great deal. A word that began as theater slang for a flop had become, by 1926, a name the company itself was willing to put on a new product. The insult had turned into a brand name.

Why flivver faded and Lizzie stayed

Both nicknames outlived the Model T, whose production ended in the United States in May 1927. But they aged differently. Tin Lizzie kept its warmth, and it became the name collectors, songwriters and filmmakers reached for. When the Model A arrived, a 1928 song celebrated it with the title "Henry's Made a Lady Out of Lizzie," and the joke only worked because everyone still knew who Lizzie was.

Flivver went back to being a general word. It drifted loose from Ford and settled into the dictionary as slang for any small, cheap car, which is close to where it started. That may be why it sounds a little more old-fashioned now. Tin Lizzie belongs to one car. Flivver belongs to a way of talking about cars, the dry, deflating American habit of calling a thing what it is.

Spend time around a well-kept Model T today and you will hear both words, usually with a smile. The car that was supposed to be a fizzle sold more than 15 million copies. That is the last joke in the flivver's story, and the car got to tell it.

Sources and notes

• American Car Historian: early newspaper uses of "flivver"
• Dictionary.com: flivver
• Peace Ship (Wikipedia)
• Ford Flivver aircraft (Wikipedia)
• Ford: The Model T and its many nicknames
• The Henry Ford: "Henry's Made a Lady Out of Lizzie" sheet music