When a new invention comes along, the English language may take a little time to decide what to call it, and its initial names are often formed by analogy with something already known.  As the Oxford Companion to the English Language reports, when a ski-equipped, all-terrain vehicle was launched upon a wintry North America, it was at first called a “motorized sled,” “motor toboggan,” “autotoboggan,” or “bombardier” (after the Montreal company which manufactured it), only later achieving the definitive name “snowmobile.”

For another example, let us turn to Hollywood.  The 1941 comedy Sullivan’s Travels, written and directed by Preston Sturges, is about a successful Hollywood director who tires of making light-hearted romps like Hey, Hey in the Hayloft.  He aspires to a more serious and socially responsible cinema, namely a film to be called O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a realistic study of real conditions in the real America.  Disguising himself as a tramp, the director sets out on foot to survey the state of the country, but his wary bosses insist that he be followed by studio underlings in a luxury transport vehicle. Here’s the key sequence from Sullivan’s Travels.  Because the dialogue goes by so quickly—1941 was the hey-day of fast-talking American comedy—you may want subtitles; if they’re not already on, click on the “CC” icon.

A land-yacht may or may not have been there for the production of Cecil B. DeMille’s Northwest Mounted Police, a real film of 1940, but the vehicles themselves appeared as early as 1928, according to the OED, citing the line “There was shown at Olympia last year a ‘land-yacht’ that was palatial in its appointments.”  Note the quotation marks signaling the appearance of a neologism, and note also the obvious derivation of the name.  What’s analogous to the vehicle just developed?  Why, a palatially appointed sea-going vessel, except it travels on land.  Put those elements together and you have “land-yacht.”  Only much later would new and more demotic names—“camper,” “motor home,” or (to use the proprietary name) “Winnebago”—be found for the vehicle, which now is best known for conveying rock bands from gig to gig or ordinary vacationers from national park to national park.

So, for Sullivan’s Travels Preston Sturges did not have to invent “land-yacht” or the thing it names, but name and thing serve his purposes perfectly.  He was vastly entertained by (and entertaining about) the rambunctious, fast-thinking, aggressively inventive America of his era.  It was from this America that he drew all his comedies, a screwball America where a no-expense-spared land-yacht comes fitted with a bar and a short-wave radio and a cook dishing out breakfast pancakes; where a pretty secretary sits in the front seat taking dictation from a studio flack, hearing and mishearing the PR as it goes flying by (“Into the valley of the shadow of adversity . . .” “The shadow of the what?”), only to be corrected by the grizzled driver; where language is always there, to be played with, analogized from one meaning to another, and punned on:

MR. JONES: How about a little gin rummy?
THE DOCTOR: I don’t drink, thank you. Never touch it.