2011
12. 01
Engine/Machine -- The English words engine and mechanical (including their cognates) have traditionally had, apart from their familiar meaning, a negative connotation. Engine signified not only the kind of mechanical contrivance that it does today but, consistent with its Latin ancestor ingenium, also meant artifice, trickery, plot. In the case of machine (originally artful contrivance), its ambiguity led to the formation of of a new word: machine was retained for the neutral, purely technological sense in which it is understood today, while the negative connotations of trickery, intrigue, and deception became the burden of the word machination. This ambiguity of the English words engine and machine, which may be evidence of a deep-seated ancient distrust of technology, is also present, more or less, in their cognates in other European languages.
Peculiar to English, apparently, was the ambivalence of mechanic and mechanical. Besides their familiar value-free modern meaning, these words also had a pejorative sense... For the contemptuous use of mechanical in the sense of vulgar, low, base, the English literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries provides innumerable examples... mechanical described a characteristic somewhat indirectly linking machines with persons of low class, namely their lack of freedom... There is even more evidence that mechanical was perceived as antithetical to liberal. (O. Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe)
