4 February—First: If ever you don’t receive the direct link you expect to the Daily Disquisition, The Monitor may well be an innocent victim of your mismanaged email server. So please go to LitchfieldMonitor.com and click on the Daily Disquisition title link or whatever else suits your fancy. It’s not our fault and your server will probably (hopefully!) correct its egregious error in a day or two.

Next, thanks to Torrington Mayor Elinor Carbone I’ve learned a new word. Her Honor kindly gave me this link to explain the bicycle lanes on Prospect Street and lots more:

https://www.torringtonct.org/sites/g/files/vyhlif5091/f/uploads/2019-11-04-report.pdf

As I explained to the mayor, I’m still perplexed by the bicycle lanes on Prospect Street. And now I’m even more perplexed by the remoteness of preferred and alternate routes through built-up areas, as well as through thoroughfares with heavy traffic. But what do I know? So it’s time to move on to more momentous stuff.

Like the new word. It’s new to me, anyway. It’s “sharrow.” The Cambridge English Dictionary defines it thus: “A sign showing a bicycle under two wide arrows that is painted on a road to show that people riding bicycles and those driving cars must share the road.” And Cambridge offers this as an example of the word in a sentence: “Shared-lane markings or sharrows are not a substitute for bike lanes.” That’s the Tab dictionary, not me, though I don’t disagree; most drivers act like they own the road and cyclists have been known to taunt drivers. Selfishness rules the road. And sharrows are painted on the south end of Prospect Street.

“Sharrow” is obviously a portmanteau of “share” and “arrow.” The word was coined in 2004 by one Oliver Gajda, of the City and County of San Francisco Bicycle Program (where else?), to describe the symbol you see below. Of course, what Cambridge and evidently the English-speaking world call an arrow is actually a chevron. Or an arrowhead at best. I’m not about to quibble. But how about “shavron” as a more accurate portmanteau? Does anybody really care?

And has it occurred to anyone that the sharrow or shavron could very well be a rank insignia (or, more pedantically, insigne) of a corporal of the bike?