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@Squoocher
Entirely serious, I can assure you! My work as a founder member and researcher at the Ethno-Mechanical Institute of Geo-Anthropology (EMIGA) takes me all over the world as part of a four-strong team that sources, tests and reports on new technology. We aim to demistify complicated, esoteric mechanisms, structures and devices, rephrasing and deconstructing industry jargon where possible, and ultimately putting our colated findings into the public domain via publications, websites (such as this) and, chiefly, word of mouth. Our mission as an organisation is to one day have a single global techno-ethnic language, with roots in the common vernacular, that brings communities together around a single set of linguistic and technological values and norms. Our goal, as one of the less conspicuous partners of the London Olympics, is to have a 80 per cent-plus informed, techno-savvy population by the year 2012. My work in London over the past four years has focused almost exclusively on wheeled self-propulsive devices (bicycles, to all intents and purposes, although childrens' wheeled hobby horses and 'balance bikes' that I have studied arguably fall outside of this category) and my role on this forum has been principally that of a data-harvester, although I have 'seeded' a number of my conclusions in posts over the past few years, which, I am proud to report, have become assimilated into its quotidian lingua franca. For instance, at the risk of blowing my own trumpet, the phrase 'my ride' was my work! Before I started referring to my Cannondale in this way, a large contingent of this forum habitually referred to their ride as 'my bike', or 'my wheels'. I strived to steer this forum away from this ugly and pernicious malaprop with oblique references to an anthropological database (mainly lexographic charts and pie charts) that we had compiled based on the work of numerous field trips over the spring and summer of 1996 for the Geo-mechanical Department of Bognor University's Ethno-structural Faculty to study the hunter-gatherer Malaita rainforest tribe (which subsists primarly in canopy-dense sub-tropical esturine nodes on the fringes of limestone basins). Our work here is, although the connection will perhaps seem tenuous to the layman, is of the upmost relevance to the self-specific personal transport nomenaclature used widely among London fixed-gear and single-speed riders. To whit, my colleagues and I observed the tribesfolk referring to their kapok tree bark and twine canoes as 'my ride' ('zhulan rahjan' in their primitive mother tongue). This conflation of verbal and nounal lexicographical elements into a unified adverbial form brought the whole community together in a well nang way dat's proper wicky-wicky wild-wild well-good.