What’s in a Name?
LOS ANGELES – People are absolutely giddy about bicycles these days. Slow Bike Movements, Fast Bike Factions, and everyone in between seem to have something to say as they board the celebration bandwagon of self-propelled two-wheelers. Some are so giddy as they rush to put their thoughts to paper or screen that they make the classic bike newbie mistake. They call us something other than cyclist or bike rider. And I’m not even talking about the pejorative name-calling expletives uttered by car drivers when they’re delayed two seconds while trying to overtake me. I thought I’d heard it all, but in the LA Times recently, I saw the word cycler used instead of cyclist in this article about The Amazing Race host Phil Keoghan’s ride across the U.S.A.:
Keoghan has been an avid cycler for years, averaging about 12 hours a week on a bike…
As a result of this and other similar misuses, I prepared the above chart in order to clear up things a bit. In the upper left we see poor George Hincapie, who rides his heart out every year for the spring classics. He is an example of a cyclist. Like “looking up the word cyclist in the dictionary and seeing his picture there” kind of cyclist. Cliché, yes, but true. Bike rider also works in this case. Also, Rivet Rider, Angry Pedaler, and Cycling Head of State to paraphrase Phil Liggett. Yes, cycling can be dirty, and not just in the way George appears in the photo.
The upper right is a photo depiction of typical bikers. It’s a still from the movie Hellriders. Some might call a cyclist a biker. This is not the highest ranking misuse of the word (I will get to that shortly), and I suppose it might fit a mountain biker or a slow biker more appropriately than, say, a road cyclist. Yet when I think of a biker, I think of a motorcyclist. Biker bars, biker chicks, etc. would be more appropriate to Jay Leno than our two-wheeled hero George Hincapie. So all in all, the jury is sort of split on this one.
Continuing clockwise around the chart, we next come to a Recycler. This lad, Jack Kirby, collected enough beer cans to make his own dreamcar. Before he was a recycler, he was first a…
…cycler! Yes, he had to cycle that beer through his or his friends’ systems in order to collect enough cans to make the Mustang sculpture. I thought about using a shot of beer cans on an assembly line here, but I wanted to post a picture of a hot chick drinking beer, so I could draw some more hits from the Google. I figure TV producers search for hot chicks drinking beer as much as the next person, right? Notice that the hot chick, Irina Voronina, is not riding a bicycle, across the country or otherwise. Cyclists are not cyclers. As a matter of fact, I even made up the definition for cycler. That’s right! I just worked backwards from recycler to form an imaginary root word. I have no idea what a cycler is, except the single most inappropriate word for cyclist. My panties are really in a twist on this one and I’m not sure exactly why. It just hurts my ears to hear it. All I can say for sure is that The LA Times needs a cyclist ombudsman, editor, whatever.
This is just version 1 of a work-in-progress. Let me hear what you have to say about the subject. I’ll include the good suggestions in version 2.
