21 December 2008

Please Stop Using Bikey as an Adjective

Call me scrooge, a curmudgeon, what have you...but is "bikey" even a word? Not that I'm a rigorous linguist, I believe that the vernacular has to have room to grow and reshape as it has forever, but this psuedo-word is definitely suffering from overuse. I'll admit the first time I heard it I found it catchy, whimsical. Maybe even tried it on a time or two in print or conversation. But here's the thing: for it's own sake the use of the term needs to be reined in. Exhibit A: the home page of the BikePortland.org facebook group has no less than three invocations of the term currently. Such a unique and tenuous term needs careful handling during its gestation or suffer the fate of words that become inextricable linked to the time and place of their emergence, such as '80s Valley lexicon stalwarts "radical" or "totally". It's a word that calls attention to itself and should be reserved for use as a hook or surprise, maybe once every three weeks at most. Because everyone who sees it is going to use it, and then it's not special at all, now is it?

Here's a Christmas message from my kids. I think I'll need to spike their hot chocolates with Motrin on X-mas eve to get them asleep.




It's the first day of winter and we're blanketed by 8-inches of snow right now with more on the way. Longer days marks the first of several lifelines mother nature offers during this tilt away from the sun's love here in Portland, Ore.--exactly halfway between the Equator and the North Pole. Have you ever studied body language? If the earth and the sun were at a singles' bar right now the sun would be buying drinks and the earth would be pretending to look at something on her Blackberry.

So what am I going to do with my extra minute of daylight tomorrow? I'm going to try to come up with synonyms for bikey.

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