As electric bikes dominate our cycleways, what do we call plain old bikes? You know the kind: the fixies or Malvern Stars, the type the ghost of Hubert “Oppy” Opperman would recognise. I put the question on social media, causing a traffic jam.

You call them bikes, said some. Same as we did last year, and the year before that. Yet surely bike is too generic, since most e-bikers call their e-bike a bike, dropping the prefix altogether. Just as the shared verb is cycling, which it is, but a sort of assisted cycling.

So why split the difference, asked others? Either way, it’s a good thing for cyclists of any persuasion, drawing on whichever energy, to be out and about. True, speaking as someone who owns both options, since my ebike (let’s lose that hyphen) is a midweek dust-off, or an appealing commute, leaving the pushbike for an honest weekend slog.

Pushbike, of course, was a popular suggestion, presuming a distinction matters. Since it does, just as mail now falls into email and postage, or snail mail in slang. If I said I’d mailed the party invitations, then you’d want to know if you should check inbox or letterbox, assuming you’re invited. Ditto for a cycle trip in August. What kind of cycling, you’d ask. Because the mode counts.

Perhaps the trip involves p-bikes, where p stands for pedal, as Colin Trainor offered. A snail bike? An acoustic bike? A deadly treadly? Maggie Hunter favoured a tortoise bike, though that label doesn’t apply to the lycra rockets we see at the Olympics. What about a free-range bike, the flipside of battery? A muscle bike? An analogue bike? An exercise bike, but one that’s fled its spin class, on the lam?

Loading

Welcome to the realm of retronyms. The fact your phone is now a camera, a web portal, a torch and more, demands the original be called a dumb phone, a rotary-dial phone, a landline. When Dylan went electric, he snubbed the acoustic. You’re either reading this column online or in a print newspaper, the hard copy, the dead-tree edition.

Often these distinctions won’t need drawing. Say you watched a TV show, be that on free-to-air, or catch-up, or streaming. The platform question matters less than your enjoyment, the name of the show. At heart, what counts is a language that can distinguish, should the need arise.

David Bennett reminded me that bike, the catchall noun, has long been cluttered by qualifiers. Just consider motorbikes, road bikes, trail bikes, mountain bikes, folding and recumbent bikes, track and tandem, cargo and gravel, cruiser and cyclocross. Each velocipede (literally speedy-foot) answers to bicycle, just as a penny-farthing gave way to its slimmer bike-self that Elliott once pedalled with ET in the basket.