Charming though it may be, that pegged my BullShit-O-Meter...
Sure enough, it seems you'll
never find a Honda manual from 1962 or any other year with even a remotely similar how-to guide in it, either outlandishly-translated "Janglish" or even in Japanese. Turns out it first appeared towards the end of World War I in the September 3, 1918 issue of the British automotive penny journal,
The Motor, as described in its January 28, 1953 issue's retrospective article, "The Impact of the First World War",
as shown here.In short, it seems that whole "Go Soothingly!" thing was just concocted at the last minute by some staffer named B.A. Hunt to quickly fill some space in the journal cut out by the wartime censors just before they were going to press. As they might have admitted then, it was a complete fabrication from whole cloth, and naught save poppycock, malarkey, bunkum and humbug.
Really, the concern for the behavior to and of horses should be a huge tipoff that this piece hailed from a more "heroic" earlier age of motoring than the '60s, when horses (and horse shit) were still a major concern for the motorist. Those goggles weren't just for show or the wind. To his credit, Mr. Hunt's original 1918 version is far more grammatically and orthographically sophisticated than that much later knockoff--"hove," after all, is a perfectly cromulent word.
Topic: How to Ride Motorcycles (Read 2540 times)