Some Good Words, Some Bad

There are words I like, cacophony, antediluvian, semiotic, and words I don’t, enmity, colonel, duodenum. There are words I wish were words, like craptasm and smugputz, and words I wish weren’t, like monetization and senescence. Cycling contains its own vocabulary, the sorts of nonsense that doesn’t even make it into the NY Time crossword, and those are the words I want to address today.

In cycling, we have some compounds like freewheel and tubeset that are good and straightforward, and some less good, like chainstay and headset. Freewheel is an inspiring concoction, and tubeset feels accurate. I don’t know what a ‘stay’ is outside of this term, and nowhere in the word headset do you get the sense of bearings gliding through races that is the crux of the item in question. For chainstay, I’d prefer ‘lower strut.’ For headset, I could live with ‘bearingset.’ I’d throw ‘turnybobber’ into the suggestion box too, but just to make you say it at least once.

And then there are the Frenchisms. Derailleur sucks. You feel like an idiot pronouncing it properly, and you feel like a Philistine saying ‘derailer.’ The British call that part the ‘mech,’ and I like that. Rear mech. Front mech. The root is ‘mechanism,’ and that’s a good word in my book.

Mixte is another French word, and I like the way it sounds, even if the type of bike it describes, with small, twin headtubes tracing a path from headtube to rear axle, is kinda dumb. Since the term ‘hybrid’ to describe a bike means almost nothing, I’d replace that with mixte, just for kicks.

All the racing words like domestique and rouleur and puncheur are pretty good, but you sound kinda pretentious if you use them. The anglicized versions are dumb though. No one likes a puncher. And a domestic is someone who cleans your house. No one cleans my house, to be clear. I’m not fancy like that.

Gravel is a bad word. I prefer dirt.

Saddle is poor. I like seat.

Fat bike seems inappropriate. I’m not here to judge those bikes.

Bottom bracket seems not fit-for-purpose. That should be the ‘spindle-hole.’

Toe clips should be called cages, and clipless pedals should be called ‘clip-ins’ or ‘snap-tights’ or ‘click-clacks,’ but then we’re getting a little too cutesy again.

Even handlebar isn’t very good. What is that? A bar with handles? What are the options though, ‘griprod’ or ‘handsteerer?’ We’d be growing griprod mustaches? Nope. We’ll leave that one alone.

I don’t want to sound like a total duodenum, but the semiotics of cycling are a cacophony of mala-appropriation and stilted garbage. Many of the etymologies are painfully antediluvian. Words and meanings tend to be sticky though. What might sound odd to us the first time it exits our mouths, quickly becomes an unconscious signifier of meanings. We can’t not say it, because it’s the thing we’ve all agreed means the thing. Time and repetition remove the hard, strange edges, and then we’re just spewing sounds all day, like a dry chain or a loose spindlehole.

We can change this, you and I. We can wash our mouths clean of words like ‘gravel,’ and commit to something better. Just pick one and do it. I’m on board. In the comments below tell me which one you’re taking, either one I brought up or one of your own. We can’t make it worse. It’s already a craptasm.

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