Gasoline

Gasoline (pronounced gas-uh-leen)

(1) A volatile, flammable liquid mixture of hydrocarbons, obtained from petroleum and used as fuel in internal-combustion engines or as a solvent.

(2) In the slang of drug users, marijuana, especially if notably potent (also as gas and there’s evidence both gas and gasoline have been used of other drugs).

(3) In slang, a cocktail made by mixing a spirit with an energy drink (the original believed to be a combination of vodka & Red Bull).

As used to describe the “light, volatile liquid obtained from distillation of petroleum”, gasoline dates from 1864 and was a variant of Gasolene which in the UK had been trade-marked the year before.  The word gasolene was from a trade-marked brand of petroleum-derived lighting oil, registered in 1862 which was based on the surname of English publisher and tea & coffee merchant John Cassell (1817–1865) who branched out into lighting fuel, marketed as both Cazeline & Cazzoline.  His publishing house Cassell & Co endures today as an imprint of the Octopus Publishing Group.  The surname Cassell was from the Anglo-Norman castel (a cognate of the English castle), from the Old French castel, from the Latin castellum, a diminutive of castrum.  The -eline suffix was from the Ancient Greek ἔλαιον (élaion) (oil, olive oil), from ἐλαία (elaía).  Etymologists speculate the spelling of gasolene (and thus gasoline) may have been influenced by Gazeline, an Irish product which was a clone of Cazzoline, either the promoters liked the assumed association with “gas” or simply they found it a more attractive word.  It’s though the general construct gas-o-line was built with the “o” representing the Latin oleum (oil) and the ending a borrowing from the chemical suffix -ine.  The alternative form gasolene is extinct in every market except Jamaica.  Gasoline is a noun & adjective and gasolinic is an adjective; the noun plural is gasolines.

Moderne BV-Aral Tankstelle (modern BV-Aral gas station), Bochum, FRG (Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany)), 1958.  The cars are an Opel Rekord (left), a Volkswagen Type 14 (Karmann Ghia) coupé (centre) and a Volkswagen Type 1 (Beetle) (right).  In the background stands the head office of the oil company BV-Aral AG.

In the US, the shortened form “gas” was in common use by at least 1897 but on the pattern of use typically found in other words, it’s likely it was around almost as soon as gasoline went on sale.  The “gas station” (place to fill up one’s automobile (“gassing up”) with gasoline by use of a “gas pump”) was recorded in California in 1916 and was in national use by the early 1920s.  The “gas pedal” (the accelerator) was first recorded in 1908 and is still used even in markets where the term petrol is preferred, as in the phrase “step on the gas” (depress the accelerator (ie go faster)) which is used generally to suggest increasing speed or effort and is not confined to automobiles.  The term gas-guzzler (a car with a high fuel consumption) was coined in 1973 after the first oil shock and in 1978 the US federal government imposed the first stage of its long-running “gas-guzzler tax”.  The noun gasohol (a gasoline with a small percentage of ethanol was coined in 1975; the mix was another reaction to the increase in the oil price and occasional shortages in the era.  To “pour gasoline on the fire” is a suggestion some action is making an already bad situation worse.  The term Avgas (the construct being av(iation) + gas) was coined during the First World War (1914-1918) when it was found the mix used in automobiles was unsuitable for aircraft which needed a mixture with higher specific energy (ie high octane).  The use in North America (and a handful of other places) of “gas” to refer to what is otherwise generally known as “petrol” sometimes mystifies because in many markets the usual distinction for road transport is between vehicles fueled by diesel, petrol & gas (usually liquid petroleum gas (LPG) or compressed natural gas (CNG).

Entertainment Tonight (ET) deconstructs Lindsay Lohan’s dance moves at a New Jersey gas station, October 2019.  According to ET, the routine was executed between gas pumps 3 & 4.

In chemistry, gas is matter in an intermediate state between liquid and plasma that can be contained only if it is fully surrounded by a solid (or in a bubble of liquid, or held together by gravitational pull); it can condense into a liquid, or can (in care cases) become a solid directly by deposition. The common synonym is vapor (also as vapour).  The word was a borrowing from the Dutch gas which was coined by chemist Brussels-based chemist & physician Jan Baptist van Helmont (1580–1644), from the Ancient Greek χάος (kháos) (chasm, void, empty space) and there may also have been some influence from geest (breath, vapour, spirit).  More speculatively, there were also the writings of the Swiss physician, alchemist, lay theologian, and philosopher of the German Renaissance Theophrastus von Hohenheim (circa 1493-1541 and known usually as Paracelsus) who wrote of kháos in the occultist’s  sense of “proper elements of spirits”" or "ultra-rarified water”, both of which accorded with van Helmont's definition of gas which he introduced to the world in Ortus medicinae, vel opera et opuscula omnia (The Origin of Medicine, or Complete Works (1648)) with the words Hunc spiritum, incognitum hactenus, novo nomine gas voco (“This vapor, hitherto unknown, I call by a new name, ‘gas’”).

Lindsay Lohan gassing up her Porsche, Malibu, California, April 2020.

The use in science in the modern sense dates from 1779 and it was adopted for specific applications as technologies emerged or were commercialized: To describe a “combustible mix of vapors” the term “coal gas” was first used in 1794; the use in medicine for the anesthetic nitrous oxide was from 1794 (made famous in dentistry as “laughing gas” although the laughter was induced by impurities introduced in the early production processes rather than the inherent properties of N₂O); “Poison gas” was from 1900" (1900).  The meaning “intestinal vapors” emerged in 1882 while the not unrelated sense of “empty talk” was from 1847 (meaning something like “hot air”) although more positively, by 1953 “it’s a gas” meant “something exciting or excellent”, “a gasser” in 1944 meaning much the same.  James Joyce (1882–1941) in Dubliners (1914) used gas to mean “fun, a joke”, an Anglo-Irish form thought linked to the use of laughing gas in dentistry.  In drag racing “gassers” (so named because they were fueled by gasoline rather than methanol or nitromethane) were the most common of the highly modified road cars in the early days of the sport but the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) retired the category in 1972 and split the participation of gasoline-powered units into a number of classes.

Art Deco gas station, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California, 1931.

The “gas-works” was first described in 1914 and was a little misleading because they were actually bulk-storage facilities from which gas was distributed either by fixed lines or cylinders delivered to the premises.  The kitchen appliance the “gas-oven” was mentioned first in 1851 although “gas-stove” by then had been in use for three years.  The notorious “gas chambers” used by the Nazis in their mass-murder programmes are most associated with the attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe but the first were actually built in 1939, as part of Aktion T4 which involved the killing of those with physical and intellectual disabilities.  These early facilities used carbon monoxide and were built within Germany and served also to murder other prisoners and although by later standards inefficient, were adequate for the numbers involved.  As territories to the east were occupied, similar structures were built and there were ever experiments with “mobile chambers”, large air-tight van coachwork added to truck chassis into which the exhaust gasses were ducted.  Again, these worked but by 1941 the Nazis now wished to exterminate millions and the most efficient method was found to be scaled-up chambers (disguised as shower rooms) into which the hydrogen cyanide-based anti-vermin fumigant Zyklon B was introduced, permitting a throughput at the most productive death camps of some 5500 at day, sometimes for months at a time.  The term “gas chamber” was widely used during the post-war hearings conducted by the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg (1945-1946) but as a method of judicial execution, many nations had by then used them at various times and the US only recently abandoned use of the method.

Roadsters line up to gas up, Gasoline Alley, Indianapolis Motor Speedway, May 1960.  This was one of the official postcards sold in the speedway's shop.

Gasoline Alley is the name of the garage area at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.  That wasn’t the original name but in the 1920s, “gasoline alley” was the drivers’ slang for the forecourt at the back of the garages where the cars were taken to refuel.  Whether linked or not, there was in the era a popular newspaper comic strip called Gasoline Alley and the use of the name soon extended to the strip dividing the two rows of garages.  It caught the public imagination and the facility managers in the early 1950s added signage which meant the whole garage area became associated with the term.  As a result of the reconstructions necessitated by fires, modernization & expansion, Gasoline Alley is not recognizable compared to its original appearance but the name remains, even thought actual gasoline is now rarely pumped, the open-wheel cars switching first to methanol (1965) and later (2006) ethanol and it’s only when other categories use the track that gasoline is in the tanks.  If the sport is compelled to convert to electric (or hopefully hydrogen) propulsion, the name is unlikely to change.

Rod Stewart (b 1945), Gasoline Alley (1970).