"Machine" as a 1920s American term for "car"
Solution 1:
The Oxford English Dictionary's definition 5h of machine is ‘originally and chiefly U.S. A motor vehicle, especially a car.’ The first recorded use with this meaning is from 1901: ‘His assistant crouching at his feet out of range of the swift-flying currents of air produced by the mad flight of the machine.’ There is also a Hammett citation from 1929. The word seems to have been used in this sense throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
Machine is a versatile word. Remember the film 'Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines'? And when Windows is doing some housekeeping on my computer, I am told ‘Please do not power off or unplug your machine.’
Solution 2:
My parents born in 1902 and I in 1940 Baltimore Maryland. As a child they would say, "Should we walk or take the machine" meaning the car.
For context, there were probably other regional differences of usage, that may not have made it to dictionaries:
- My mother also told me to put on a "blouse" and I am male, and it sounded strange because it's what my sister wore. So, I looked it up and the word originally meant from the french, a loose garment worn by workers or peasants. So, while that word had changed it probably was commonly for both genders in her youth.
- In the era before mass media, even movies were silent in my folks youth,