Old technology revisited

I often write about the way metaphors come into use because a new technology or scientific discovery makes a new figure of speech possible, but then persist long after the technology has been superseded. We spool back or or rewind or fast-forward or cut to the chase in a story because spools and tape and scalpels and sticky-tape were once involved in recording and editing. A bowler's delivery is ram-rod straight even though muzzle-loading rifles ...

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(or should I say 'long-barreled firearms?', as the earliest muzzle-loaded guns had no rifling – the spiral grooves that increase range and accuracy; maybe they also keep the barrel cooler...? – what I don't know on this subject could hardly be more extensive)
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...are a thing of the past. I've written before about a flash in the pan, a metaphor that's still going strong, although it refers to long-gone firearms:

Flash in the pan – in a flint-lock, the trigger sparked off an explosion in a pan which itself set off the main explosion. Sometimes there was a flash in the pan, but the main charge was unaffected.
Source

My attention, though, was caught this week by something else entirely, although it involves a word that – incidentally – does this metaphorical freeze-frame trick: the word is 'charabanc'. A char in French is some sort of wheeled vehicle – a hay-cart ...

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('cart' and char are related, of course, as are Carolus and 'Charles', and many more c/ch pairs)
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... or a carnival float, or even (in a military context) a tank. But when the cart was to be used for carrying large numbers of people, it was fitted with benches – a char à bancs.

For a few years after horse-drawn vehicles had given way to the combustion engine the word 'charabanc' was used to mean a motor-coach. But then it started to go out of use, and became to all intents and purposes extinct. This graph from Collins shows the decline:

But that 'to all intents and purposes' was (as so often... 

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(I'm reminded of a lesson I used to give to my advanced ESOL students about 'dead wood' – essentially meaning-free phrases that bulk a text out but don't contribute to [and sometimes diminish] the structural soundness; what they do diminish is comprehensibility [so do big words like that].) 
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...) ill-chosen. Words don't always ...

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 (ever??? Discuss) 
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...become extinct. If you're that way inclined, and don't share my pathological hatred of pay-walls, you might want to read Old words don’t die, they just wait to be rescued. And this is where 'charabanc' came to my notice. It was in a recent edition of Newscast (don't ask me which; probably June 13 or 14) and someone was talking about the damage Covid had done to the transport system – planes, buses, cars, trains...'the whole charabanc'. 

At first I thought I must have misheard; then, given the speaker's background, I supposed that 'charabanc' must be a word he had met, and he had made a slip of the tongue – with 'charabanc' slipping unnoticed into the slot "/ʃ/<something>/bæŋ/" – especially easy since 'shebang' (the more common occupant of the phrase 'the whole ~') is marked by dictionaries with a despairing Origin unknown. 

But that 'more common' doesn't mean 'right'. For me (your search parameters may vary) a Google search of 'the whole shebang' yields About 2,620,000 results. On the other hand, 'the whole charabanc' yields About 1,170,000 results. So the less common version isn't knocked into a cocked hat; it's certainly more than the slip of the tongue that I at first suspected. 

But I should be learning my notes in preparation for the Bach on Saturday week. Bye for now. 

b

Update 2022.07.21.17:10 – Added PS/footnote

^PS Another of these technological fossils, relating to analogue recording but living on in a digital age is footage. A journalist will say things 'Have you seen the footage?' although no linear recording medium (film) is involved.