User:Jeep guru/Nordic Expedition Vehicle

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References

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Origin of the name

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There are many explanations of the origin of the word jeep, all of which have proven difficult to verify. The most widely-held theory is that the military designation of GP begat the term Jeep and holds that the vehicle bore the designation GP (for Government Purposes or General Purpose), which was phonetically slurred into the word jeep, in the same way that the contemporary HMMWV (for High-Mobility Multi-purpose Wheeled Vehicle) has become known as the humvee.

An alternative view launched by R. Lee Ermey, on his television series Mail Call, disputes this, saying that the vehicle was designed for specific duties, and was never referred to as "General Purpose" and it is highly unlikely that the average jeep-driving GI would have been familiar with this designation. The Ford GPW abbreviation actually meant G for government use, P to designate its 80-inch (2,000 mm) wheelbase and W to indicate its Willys-Overland designed engine. Ermey suggests that soldiers at the time were so impressed with the new vehicles that they informally named it after Eugene the Jeep, a character in the Popeye cartoons created by E. C. Segar. Eugene the Jeep was Popeye's "jungle pet" and was "small, able to move between dimensions and could solve seemingly impossible problems."[1]

See also

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  1. ^ "Wordorigins.org". Wordorigins.org. Retrieved 2010-07-04.