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I am the caller who originated the bike/unicycle question. When a unicycle is referred to as a bike it is usually a child who says it or someone putting little effort into their vocabulary. Using a more obscure or complicated word won't help in the field. If I tell my wife that I went on a bike ride she will think I rode a bicycle (which I can also do!) so I don't use "bike" to mean unicycle. If someone points at my unicycle and says "nice bike" I will say thanks.
The reason that I brought it up is that I have seen many online entries from unicyclists complaining or correcting people who call their unicycles bikes based on the argument that the 'BI' in bike still means two just as in bicycle. This always hit me as a little stuffy and suspicious because "bike" has been around awhile doing plenty of heavy lifting on its own and has made its own life. Not only can you call your Harley Davidson a bike but there are water bikes and skate bikes and who knows what other contraptions have borrowed the word.
Just in case this topic hasn't been confusing enough be comforted to know that there are multi-wheeled unicycles which are tall (giraffes) and have wheels stacked on top of one another transferring the force instead of a chain. This arrangement requires the rider to pedal backward with an even number of wheels or forward with and odd count. Are they still unicycles? Seems to me less confusing if the modifier trumps the prefix of the root word.
tromboniator said:
EmmettRedd said:
I LIKE UIKE.
As in Dwight David Ueisenhower?
I had independently thought up "uike" and its pronounciation, yike, but did not have time to write it up because a proposal deadline was looming. However, once it was published, I wanted to support it. What better way than to recycle a campaign slogan from a popular president? It was also short enough that it did not impact my proposal writing work. Its punnynish did not hurt either.
Emmett
I wouldn't say nobody knows it; I've been familiar with it for decades. None of the definitions I've found is as general as you suggest. They pretty much insist on two or three wheels, powered by feet on the ground or crank attached to the front axle. I think that velo is used these days to refer to matters of the bicycle.
I too knew the term "velocipede" but thought it referred only to those older style bicycles that had a huge front wheel and small back wheel. But at least according to Wiki, it is indeed an "umbrella" term for any human powered vehicle. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocipede.
Curious though, in that Wiki article, all but one of the sample photos show that older style bicycle as examples.
I've been trying to catch up on the shows online myself and the buckeye sure had me laughing. I do remember encountering the word as a very young kid, most likely from my reading addiction, and I remember it referring to a faulty eye of a horse. That's how I remember it. However, the part that had me laughing hard was that our people, Hmong, have something similar. As the previous posted said, as kids we do this sometimes to taunt other kids or just to be silly. You don't have to do anything but pull the bottom eyelid down and kids get the meaning.
If I'm not mistaken this is common among Asians. My parents use the term to lecture us even if we didn't do anything, but rather to prevent us from acting "silly".
Well, I don't know if there's any overlap or etymology related this use of "buckeye," but the Ohio State Buckeye's are so named for "chestnuts." The chestnut tree is native to Ohio, and chestnuts look like the eyes of a deer (big and brown) and are referred to as either "chestnuts" or "buckeyes" in the Midwest.
Could it be that the act of pulling down one's lower eyelid makes the eye appear larger, like a buck's eye?
The ironic thing is that, due to shifting climate zones from global warming, the chestnut tree population is declining in Ohio, and moving north into Michigan, which just happens to be one of Ohio's longstanding athletic rivals.
Late in on this, but new to this forum.
Re forte: Perhaps I missed it, but the obvious reference for me is the dynamic marking in music f which is always in English pronounced fortay with a very slight accent of the first sylable. There are very much fewer piano students these days and playing in a band or an orchestra may seem positively archaic to many, but in my family knowing music and its terminalogy is the norm, as it was in many American families a century ago.
I rarely hear forte pronounced fort, even when there is no obvious musical connection. When I do, I find it an oddity and presume that the person using that pronunciation has no musical education and is likely not from around here.
About "buckeye" — bear with me, because this is a long speculation –
I've never heard this slang or seen this little ritual trick, but I mostly grew up in Virginia & Martha's mention about an old use for the term that meant second-rate triggered an idea. These are the elements of it:
Word Detective says, "Apparently the buckeye tree was considered useless and annoying by early settlers, and as of the mid-19th century the adjective "buckeye" (as in "buckeye lawyer") was synonymous with "second-rate" or "incompetent."
Cassell's (2005) Dictionary of Slang adds the notion of a rustic country person as well as the definition of Buck-eyed: adj. [mid-19thc+] (US Black) having eyes considered out of the ordinary, cross-eyed, squinting, protruding, etc. [SE buck, to project].
I don't know if this is coincidence or confluence, but given the fact that these two slang terms come from the same era, I can't help but think that they might be related or perhaps co-evolved with each other. Not quite sure what "SE buck, to project" refers to, except that SE means "standard English." At any rate, we're getting closer to a connection between someone with funny eyes and an incompetent rustic country person who could be easily fooled.
It may be too much of a leap to make, but all of this made me think of my studies on 'poor white trash' in graduate school, reading the passionate frustration with which 19th c. scholars described poor whites in the South (who were mostly the descendants of poor Scots-Irish & English prisoners whose greatest crime was usually poverty) as lazy, bony, sallow, lank-haired, with misshapen heads, dull sunken eyes, "awkward manners, and a natural stupidity or dullness of intellect that almost surpasses belief" (D.R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States, 264.). Growing up in the South, we all know about this stuff but are too polite to talk about it much these days. It's the Deliverance stuff. But, as it turns out, there was some science to the story.
At the turn of the last century, hookworm disease was discovered in epidemic proportions in this population and a campaign set out to erradicate it. Most people in that social class didn't wear shoes, walked in feces-contaminated soil (didn't have outhouses, etc.), and caught the worm through breaks in the skin — hookworm only grows in tropical and subtropical soil, thus its presence in the South. Then they craved dirt because of the hookworms (and earned another nickname: clay-eaters) & re-infected themselves — a vicious cycle. Despite the fact that severe hookworm infection causes mental retardation when acquired in infancy, as well as severe anemia (sallow, lazy, bony) & many of the other physical symptoms observed by Hundly & others, the campaign to transform poor whites into model citizens by treating hookworm disease didn't work...because its true cause was poverty. Turns out the healthy immune system (made so by good diet & the other hallmarks of a good standard of living) can either keep hookworm at bay or eliminate it. In the end, it took longer to bring about the social change that was needed to end that depth of poverty.
Anyway, this is all gross and to say that maybe "buckeye" is a reference to this throw-away class of people that were seen as stupid and ignorant and funny-eyed due to malnutrition and the maladies of poverty.
I don't think it's the "my eye" interpretation, because, as someone else pointed out, that has the opposite meaning: "I see you, I see through your game."
And buckeye could be some other reference altogether! This was just what jumped to my mind.
Thanks. I LOVE this show!
**ps: The symptoms of drooping, sunken or yellow eyes may have been the hallmark chosen and codified by this slang ritual -- that, actually, now that I think of it, is starting to ring a bell. Not in relation to pulling someone's leg and not with the word "buckeye," but pulling the lower lid down to indicate idiocy, backwardness, etc. I'd have to have to ask old-timers to be sure.
Heimhenge said:
I too knew the term "velocipede" but thought it referred only to those older style bicycles that had a huge front wheel and small back wheel. But at least according to Wiki, it is indeed an "umbrella" term for any human powered vehicle. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocipede.
Curious though, in that Wiki article, all but one of the sample photos show that older style bicycle as examples.
I first encountered velocipede in Wodehouse years ago. I would have assumed that he was referring to one of those 19th-century contraptions.
imajoebob said:
I'm sorry, but allowing people to make up foreign words is simply not acceptable to me. When someone pronouncing forte says "for-TAY," they are not just employing the wrong language of the chosen word, they aren't even using a real word! … But at the most basic, use of the French 'forte" is not a substitution for a missing English word or phrase; it is an idiom used for specific meaning and emphasis. My strengths may include maths, reaching items on high shelves, and mowing the lawn. But arguing is my forte.
I agree entirely. ForTAY is wrong on every level.
Bike is already loaded enough in that it refers to both bicycles and motorcycles. Please, let's not start adding unicycles and tricycles as well! By the way, does anyone know why tricycle is pronounced with a short 'i' instead of the long 'i' used in all the other 'cycles'?
Re Between and Among: I am staunchly opposed to using these interchageably. Between implies two whereas among can mean any number more than two. Using one to mean the other is confusing – at least to me – and that surely is not our purpose.
Theowyn said:
Bike is already loaded enough in that it refers to both bicycles and motorcycles. Please, let's not start adding unicycles and tricycles as well! By the way, does anyone know why tricycle is pronounced with a short 'i' instead of the long 'i' used in all the other 'cycles'?
Er, you pronounce tricycle with a short 'i'? I've never heard it pronounced that way. Furthermore, I've never heard unicycle pronounced with a long 'i'. (I suppose this could be regional. I've lived all my life in California; I grew up in SoCal, and presently live in the Bay Area.)
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