Last week Sydney Morning Herald columnist Miranda Devine wrote a piece about how cyclists are all bastards who have no place on the road and how motorists would be justified in running them over and how she hopes they will all just fuck off.

Whoever made up the Roads and Traffic Authority’s 1990s slogan ”the road is there to share” has a lot to answer for. It’s a big fat lie. The road is not there to share. Roads are built for cars. Pretending otherwise is unfair to motorists and cyclists alike.

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The ideologues who have fostered the road-sharing lie must think a few dead cyclists and pedestrians are a small price to pay for getting cars off the road, because that is their ultimate aim: to make driving so unpleasant, slow, expensive and fraught with hazards that motorists give up.

There was, however, one line in the article that particularly caught my attention.

The former roads minister Carl Scully, a vegetarian cyclist, threw $250 million at the [bicycle] lobby, further fuelling expectations which were dashed by subsequent roads ministers.

So I tweeted my concerns (because that’s what any self-respecting Web2.0 devotee does in 2009.)

And Miranda got back to me post-haste.

When my girlfriend got home from work and found me in a state of paranoia, tearing up light fittings and pot plants looking for the hidden camera in my house, it took a lot of explaining.

But seriously, who the fuck does Miranda think she is? The behaviour of one, two, or even 100 cyclists no more represents all cyclists than the behaviour of one, two or 100 motorists represents all motorists. For every dickhead bike rider on the roads there is at least one equally dickheadish driver. In no way do I defend the actions of the particular cyclist in Devine’s article, or of any cyclist who breaks the law or acts aggressively, but if I had a latte for every motorist who has endangered my life on the road due to their illegal or aggressive behaviour …

Anyway, initially I was genuinely angry about Miranda’s article but then someone on Twitter who is much smarter than me coined the term “trollumnist”.

I like it. (The smug head tilt in the avatar makes me want to punch him in the face, but.)

So I got to thinking about the perjorative terms commonly used by trollumnists to attack those they so despise. Obviously there’s “leftist” and “greenie”, “latte-sipper” and “inner-city”, and Miranda’s “vegetarian” and “cyclist”. These terms can also be combined for greater effect, so “vegetarian cyclist” is greater than “vegetarian” or “cyclist”, and “inner-city latte-sipper” is greater than “inner-city” or “latte-sipper”. And “latte-sipping inner-city greenie vegetarian cyclist” is much worse again by many orders of magnitude, only to be exceeded in troll value by changing the word “vegetarian” to “vegan”. Ouch.

But if we – the ordinary people – are ever to defeat the trollumnists, we must pre-empt their trolling and prepare for it. With this in mind, let’s attempt to work out which perjorative terms are likely to appear in future pieces by the trollumnists and compile them for ease of future reference. Get to it in comments, Groupthinkers.