Pylimitics

There’s a lot of talk about “dashboards” in the business world today. Everybody wants a dashboard presenting a summary of relevant information. Some software products are, to users, dashboards. The ready analogy, of course, is the dashboard in an automobile. It also occurs to me that as manufacturers switched from analog gauges to electrical indicators starting around the 1960s, the term “idiot lights” also arose, at least in the US.

But the word “dashboard” predates the automobile. There haven’t been any kind of “boards” used in cars for many decades, and what the word “dash” is doing there doesn’t relate to anything in a car. Really the word “dashboard” is from about the 1840s, and was originally a real board. It was the piece of wood attached to your wagon or carriage just in front of your feet to block the dirt and mud from the hooves of your horses and keep your trousers clean. or clean-ish. “Dash” refers to spattering, as in “they dashed water in his face to bring him around after the knockout punch.”

The earliest automobiles were just copies of horse-drawn carriages (sometimes actual carriages) with an engine instead of a horse, and so the dashboard (the real one) was still there. It became increasingly vestigial as designs evolved, but the term stuck anyway. It took a while for any sort of instrumentation to be attached to cars, and many decades for all the instruments to migrate to the panel in front of the driver — even into the 1930s some cars displayed engine temperature via a motometer, which was a thermometer built into the radiator cap at the front of the car, outside the engine compartment. As late as the 1970s some American muscle cars had tachometers mounted outside on the hood. That hood-mounted tach was just a styling gimmick; it was supposed to copy drag racing cars and, I suppose, make you think your car was really fast. Or at least really loud, which in come circles is even better.

“Dash” itself, by the way, may have originated in Old Norse; there is still a similar word in some Scandinavian languages (“daske” in Danish, “daska” in Swedish) meaning flap or slap. We’re definitely stuck with the term “dashboard” by now, but when you see marketing copy touting “a single pane of glass dashboard,” just remember: the original purpose was to keep the mud and manure out of your face.