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Motorcycle terminology certainly hasn’t entered common usage the way many phrases we employ came from other pursuits. I was recently listening to a radio programme about quarrying, and the presenter remarked how many expressions in common use come from that industry. Become ‘stone deaf,’ for example, is exactly what happened to an underground workers as the sound of hammers and chisels reverberated around them. And when we say that something useless isn’t worth a candle,’ it dates from the way miners had to buy their own candles in order to see what they were doing, yet didn’t get paid if the extracted rock wasn’t of adequate quality. It got me thinking about the origins of all the other expressions we use without thinking, and why virtually none of them stem from motorcycling. Perhaps it’s because they mostly originated with old working practices that everybody understood at the time. When virtually the entire population lived on the land, for instance, nobody could doubt that ‘ploughing a lonely furrow’ applied to the awkward codger who insisted on going his own way. And going back even further, many people would have come across ex-sailors who knew that being ‘being taken aback’ actually referred to the potentially lethal result of the wind suddenly swinging on to the wrong side of a ship’s sail, but chose to use the expression to graphically describe their reaction when surprised. Motorcycle manufacturer, on the other hand, was a more modern pursuit, and one that only involved a relatively small proportion of the population, so it never had much chance for any specialized expressions to spread into common usage. “Throwing a spanner is the works’ is one well-understood phrase that might well describe activities practiced (accidentally or on purpose) by workers in the motorcycle industry, but I image it actually dates back to Luddite practices during the industrial revolution. Of course, lots of specialized words and phrases are used to describe various aspects of motorcycling, but they haven’t entered mainstream use, even though some – such as wheelie and race-replica –might well be understood by non-motorcyclists. Joe Public would probably also be able to work out the meaning of ‘getting your knee down’ and having ‘knee sliders’ on your leathers, but like me he’d have no idea why anybody would deliberately get that close to the Tarmac! Other motorcycling phrases are more specialized, however, and those who’ve never watched modern racing may have never heard of ‘a high side’ when a sliding tyre suddenly finds grips and disastrously flips the bike and rider over. Once you’ve got that image, it’s obvious that a ‘low side’ is what we used to simply call a skid –the slightly less life-threatening case of the bike just slipping out from underneath its rider. Another expression used in racing is ‘short-shifting’, but since that means changing up before you’ve hit peak revs in a lower gear, it’s not very relevant to road-going classic motorcyclists who probably do that all the time. The late, great, Bob Currie did his best to enliven his reports with colourful language, and I still remember him describing a test bike (which was obviously somewhat less memorable, because I’ve not idea what it was) as ‘a cobby little forcing iron’; but I can’t see archaic phrases like that entering general use. I think it was also Bob Currie who described a big single as a ‘one-lunger’; but since my group of pals couldn’t decide whether that meant it had one lung, or that the large piston lunged up and down, that probably wasn’t his more successful literary effort, either. Velocette’s Harold Willis was well-known for the idiosyncratic way he referred to motorcycles and their component parts. But giving machine nicknames like ‘Whiffling Clara’ and calling valves ‘nails’, and tyres ‘hoops’ is sort of thing any eccentric person might do without creating a legend if they weren’t already famous. Conversely, I doubt he had anything to do with christening Velocettes’ Brooklands-styled silencers as ‘Fishtails,’ even though it’s the one piece of marque-specific terminology that’s stood the test of time (I’d perhaps add Jampot, too, Rod. Ed). Turning to Nortons, racer and trader Harold Daniell actually increased his fame by calling the duplex frame a ‘Featherbed’, but that would be incomprehensible to Joe Public, and as many other bikes provide more comfortable ride it doesn’t make much sense to me, either! In fact, the only expressions I can think of that started in motorcycling and have truly entered common usuage as ‘Mods and Rockers’ and ‘doing the ton.’ But since the over-publicised skirmishes between the former mobs of yobs did untold harm to our reputation, and my dictionary defines a ton-up of mortocyclist as someone who ‘noisily and recklessly travels at 100 mph,’ it’s not much of a contribution either to culture or to the language that gave us Shakespeare and Wordsworth, is it? -Roy Poynting When riding, don't forget to wear a custom painted helmet or a carbon fiber helmet
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