fakenger n. a person who imitates the fashion of, or uses equipment similar to, a bike messenger. Editorial Note: Synonyms are “posenger” and “pretendenger.” Etymological Note: fake + messenger (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
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Eyyyee, who’s the fakenger? I converted my 20 yr. old road bike to a fixed gear, ‘cause I like the pared-down simplicity, and the feel of the ride. I use a front brake, and egg beaters too. I don’t give a fuck if it offends messenger posers. Man, I walked into one of their stores, Trackstar I think, and those fuckers wouldn’t even talk to me. I felt like I was in high school. How many of those guys actually work as messengers anyways? I thought they were all put out of business by fax machines, emails and PDFs. The only guys I see making a living on bicycles these days are hispanics delivering junk food on junky mountain bikes.
I’ve been known to troll the roads, in finest fakenger style, new Langster, timbuk2 bag, the whole thing – even the EMO glasses if I didn’t just prefer a contact lens in my good eye. And I made my living that way! I have a small biz, and decided to go bike only, and did! Put in decent miles every day, with that singlespeed – and had a bike with gears + a Burley trailer for heavy hauling. Mostly it was me and my Timbuks, I had two of them, would go around and do my buying with one, go home and drop that one off, grab the other and go do my grocery shopping, or maybe another buying run. In a way I was my own messenger.
I eventually got pissed by the difficulties of renting a car to do swapmeet sales, and caved in and got a car again – a Prius. However, as much as I like the Prius it’s still a car. I get no exercise because I end up using it instead of hopping on a bike. It costs me money. I’m no longer learning new roads and new interesting places like I was while biking.
So I may be fakenger’ing up the streets of Silicon Valley again sometime soon, making a living. I’ll be the one at the Sunnyvale Post Office with a Burley trailer fulla packages…..
I see a bright future ahead for those who “pedal their ass” for a living – as gas prices go up, and as the population ages, I see a lot of folks putting 2 and 2 together and finding it’s a lot easier to go carless and while they may do their own traveling around, some don’t have the time and some can’t (old etc) so I see people ordering a load of groceries, having various messenger type things done for a small fee. We may see lots of work for messengers to do a lot of the small jobs people used to drive their 5000-lb SUV to do.
If you ask me, a fakenger is someone who rides around acting like a messenger making deliveries for an imaginary dispatcher. Don’t confuse a fakenger with a hipster. If your a hipster, fly your hipster flag high, just don’t tell people your a messenger if your not one, that’s just sad.
There’s two words: fake which is obvious and enger deriving from messenger.
Why would someone imitating the fashion be a fakenger?