mechanic
Pluralmechanics
Pluralmechanics
- 1A person who builds or repairs machinery; especially one who services and repairs the mechanical parts of motor vehicles or aircraft.
The mechanic replaced the worn timing belt before it could snap.
Aircraft mechanics inspect every engine component according to a strict schedule.
Similartechnician, repairman, engineer
- 2
- 3A rule, function, or implementation that dictates how a game is played; a ludeme or feature.
The deck-building mechanic rewards players who plan several turns ahead.
Combat mechanics in the sequel reward timing over button-mashing.
Note
Game designers use the word as a countable noun for one rule-driven behavior: a deck-building mechanic, or a mechanic where running at a ledge makes you leap off it. The plural, mechanics, names the whole system of rules, as in the combat mechanics. Ludeme is the scholarly term for the same unit of play.
- 4A hired killer; a person paid to carry out a murder, especially on behalf of a criminal organization.
The boss sent his most reliable mechanic to deal with the informant.
Rumor had it that two mechanics were flown in for the job.
Similarhitman, assassin, killer, triggerman
Note
Crime slang borrows the tradesman's calm here: a killer who does the job as coolly as a technician fixes an engine. Newton Thornburg's Cutter and Bone (1976) builds up to the word, "a real killer, a mechanic," as the top rating a cold operator can earn. Keep it to fiction and reported underworld talk; out of context, most listeners will picture someone with a wrench.
- 5A cheat who secretly manipulates the cards or dice to control the outcome of a game.
Every gambler at the table feared the quiet mechanic in the corner.
Two mechanics worked the back rooms, fleecing tourists with marked cards.
Similarcardsharp, cheat, sharper, hustler
Note
Gamblers' slang for a hand that secretly controls the deck or the dice. It often takes a modifier, card mechanic or dice mechanic, as in Bruce Jackson's A Thief's Primer (1969). Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese's Casino (1995) mocks "half-assed mechanics" who give themselves away with signals. Like the hitman sense, it credits real skill in a craft nobody should practice.
- 6A manual worker, such as a laborer or skilled artisan who earns a living working with their hands.
The guild admitted only mechanics who had served a full apprenticeship.
A respected mechanic, he was known for the quality of his ironwork.
Similarartisan, craftsman, tradesman, workman, laborer
Note
Before engines, the word named any hand worker, and that figure is the target of the snobbery in the old "vulgar" adjective. The historian Christopher Hill, writing in 1972, describes lay preachers who were "mechanics like the rest of the congregation." Today the noun carries this meaning mainly in historical writing. Elsewhere, readers will hear the repairer of engines.
Less common meanings
- 7Concerned with machines and mechanics, or with the physical laws that govern how bodies move.
Newton's work laid out the mechanic laws of motion with great precision.
Early philosophers treated the mechanic forces of nature as a single system.
Note
This is the older adjective that mechanical has since replaced. It came through Old French and Latin from Greek mēkhanikós, "pertaining to machines or contrivance," built on mēkhanḗ, "a machine." In 1691 John Ray writes of "mechanick Philosophers" who explain the world by the motion of matter alone. The sense now survives only in older prose; in modern writing, mechanical is the word to use.
- 8Mechanical; precise but lifeless, as though performed by a machine rather than a person.
The clerk stamped each form with mechanic indifference.
But, for the unquiet heart and brain, A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise, Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.
1850, [Alfred, Lord Tennyson], In MemoriamNote
Here the machine becomes a metaphor for feeling drained away. Tennyson still uses it in 1850, in In Memoriam, calling the steady work of verse "the sad mechanic exercise," a rhythm that numbs grief like a narcotic. Unlike the physics sense, this one passes judgment: it describes human action that has gone rote. In current English, mechanical carries the same reproach.
- 9Relating to manual artisans or their class; hence coarse, common, vulgar, or base.
Mechanic slaves, With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers.
c. 1606, William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Anthonie and Cleopatra”Note
A snob's adjective in the age of Shakespeare, whose Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1606–1607) pictures "mechanic slaves, with greasy aprons, rules, and hammers." It could stay neutral, as in James Thomson's "strong mechanic tool," a craftsman's tool. Far more often it sneered: "mechanick ignorance" and a "mechanick dialect" meant coarse and low. Because the sense is obsolete, using it today reads as deliberate period color.
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Origin
It comes from Middle English mekanyk, from Old French mecanique, from Latin mechanicus ("belonging to machines or mechanics, inventive"), from Ancient Greek mēkhanikós ("pertaining to machines, ingenious, inventive"), from mēkhanḗ ("a machine, contrivance"), related to machine.