Long-time reader George Harding has taken me to that always stressful place – task – over a question of vocabulary. It’s about a bicycle, to paraphrase a certain comic novelist. And sure enough, he has called Flann O’Brien as a witness for the prosecution.
George writes: “I was very surprised to hear you use the phrase ‘push-bikes’ in [a recent] article (Diary, October 12th). That terminology went out with the flood. I remember chastising [a reporter on RTÉ's] Nationwide when he used it in relation to Kelly and Roche back in the mid-eighties.
“’Mountain’ bikes arrived at the beginning of the eighties and most of them were equipped with 18 gears, therefore there would be no reason to ‘push’ a bike – you cycled it.
“The term faded as far back as the late sixties, when I could picture a messenger boy pushing his low-gravity bike full of messages up Patrick’s Hill. I reckon my father sold the last one of those monsters in approximately 1964.”
His email concludes: “I doubt if the great Flann ever used the term, and can you imagine if he had titled the funniest book ever written by an Irishman ‘The Third Guard’?”
Well, now, first let me deal with that last question, side issue as it may be. For if the implication is that “Guard” is an old-fashioned word, superseded by the modern “Policeman”, I feel bound to protest the reverse.
As far as I can judge, The Third Policemen is set (vaguely) in a pre-independence Ireland: hence the references to “policemen” rather than the new-fangled “guards” of Flann’s time, and to “parliament” instead of the “Dáil”.
But as to the substantive point, it’s true that, when my attention was drawn to it, “push-bike” did seem an oddly archaic phrase for me to be using in 2024.
Then I remembered why I (and many others) do still use it: to distinguish the fully human-powered bicycle from the ever-multiplying e-bikes, which require little or no effort. It hardly seems fair that both forms of activity are described as “cycling”.
Also, from a personal viewpoint, the bikes I mostly use these days are the Dublin rental variety, which weigh more than some small cars. On any kind of hill, those are always a bit of a schlep (another word we were discussing here recently).
And I do literally push them on occasion, for example when carrying a Christmas tree. On the plus side, you can – with careful balancing – transport a seven-foot tree along the spine of a Dublin bike. But you can’t usually fit yourself in the saddle at the same time.
All this said, it was only thanks to George’s email that I finally realised there is, for some cyclists, a principled objection to the term “push-bikes”.
They consider it, in the words of one cycling blogger “offensive, old-fashioned, and obnoxious” (the first and last of those adjectives mean the same thing, but I suppose they serve the same role as stabilisers on a back wheel).
That was a response to the UK Department of Transport’s continued use of the phrase. But “push-bike” was first coined more than a century ago. And even then, it was considered a put-down.
An American writer, Joseph Pennell, may have been the first to use it, in 1903, and did so disparagingly. He cycled widely for a time and wrote about it. Then he became a motorbike enthusiast. Thereafter, he regarded the “push bike” with scorn.
A decade later, in 1914, the London Times noted the phrase’s increased popularity as evidence that the bicycle was on the way out, rendered obsolete by motorised transport:
“It is a year or two now since what used to be known merely as a bicycle came to be called distinctively and contemptuously a ‘push-bike,’ just as a carriage is now a ‘horse-drawn carriage’,” the paper commented. “There is a knell in each epithet.”
That obituary was premature, as it turned out. It might have astonished the Times writer that not only would bicycles be more popular than ever 110 years later, but that the term “push-bike” would still be used, with no intended contempt.
Anyway, to get to back to George’s complaint, yes, naturally, I checked the archives to see if Flann (or his Irish Times persona Myles na gCopaleen) had ever used the phrase.
And I thought I had found an example, from 1942. But that turned out to be a former IT editor, Bertie Smyllie, lamenting an effect of the war: the shortage of rubber.
“Do not think that I feel aggrieved because we have been told that there will be no more tyres for private motorists,” Smyllie wrote. “If I can scrounge a couple of second-hands for my dilapidated push-bike, I shall not grumble; for I kissed goodbye to private motoring on the day when Poland was invaded.”
Then, in a reverse of the London Times before an earlier war – and pausing for a Mylesian pun – he predicted a car-free future:
“But there will be thousands of worthy citizens of Éire who will feel the wrench badly (as Myles na gCopaleen would put it, ‘Hold that one, Joe, it’s slippery!’); and I am afraid that millions of tons of petrol will flow down the various oleoferous regions . . . before private motorists . . . will be able to take their cars out again.”