In a past life I was the editor of a little mag called the Emerald Hill Weekly, which any of you living in the City of Port Phillip, may know.

I had a weekly column, which was an absolute pleasure. It was like a blog but with a lot more responsibility as people actually took it seriously. So I’d often comment about local issues, of which there were plenty to write about, and take stances that may or not have pleased the Council or residents who were members of one of the many action groups or alliances protesting about everything from park closures to the opening of a skate park for kiddies to play on – yes, you Trevor Marmalade!

One day I was hard up for a column and I was about to go on an eleven-night cruise. Care factor was at the lower end of the scale so I followed that tried and tested cure for the weary columnist; when in doubt go the cyclists! Luckily I had a hook. Then Mayor of Port Phillip Darren Ray had been quoted as saying in a new story we ran, ”It was about time motorists subsidised pedestrians and cyclists, rather than the other way round”.

I liked Darren Ray, but took issue to this comment in that motorists pay registration, fuel levies and stamp duty on new cars so it was a bit unfair to say they were being subsidised — though I may have taken things a little too far.

This is what I wrote back in July 2005.

WHY CAN’T CYCLISTS PAY THEIR WAY?

Mayor Darren Ray justifies the parking permit fee hike by saying the money will be spent on pedestrian and cycling facilities.

That’s great, but I was taken aback by his statement that “it was about time motorists subsidised pedestrians and cyclists, rather than the other way round”. Surely he’s not suggesting that cyclists, the freeloaders of the road, have subsidised motorists in the past.

Apart from the cost of their bikes, helmets, drink bottles and so on, cyclists have a free run on Port Phillip’s hundreds of kilometres of roads and bike paths. Motorists, meanwhile, are paying record-high petrol prices, registration fees, parking permits, insurance levies, tolls, higher city parking prices and nondiscretionary speed camera fines. To say they haven’t paid their way is a tad unfair, especially when you see Lycra coated Lance Armstrong wannabes ride six abreast along Beach Road.

Cyclists are the vegetarians of the road. They ride their bikes thinking they’re saving the world, and then ram their beliefs down the throats of everyone else that discovered long ago that cars, like steak, are good.

I don’t trust radical cyclists the same way I don’t trust Amway sellers. I’m particularly suspicious of bearded men who ride those lie-down bikes that need safety flags to be seen – that really is telling the world that anything you’ve done to be noticed in the past has failed!

Then there are the Critical Mass protestors. I know one bloke who justifies blocking the roads by saying he’d like Melbourne to be more like Beijing, where most people ride their bikes to work. Fair enough. Perhaps we should take his advice and quell their next public protest with tanks.

Actually looking back at that I stand by what I wrote — OK the Tienanmen Square reference may have been a bit harsh, but it’s not like it was too soon.

Like Miranda Devine I copped a heap of shit. The poor young journalist who looked after the letters section in my absence was inundated. She had a discussion with the sub editors about whether or not they should run the personal attacks on me — of course they agreed they should. I should point out there were a few letters that agreed with me too — they even published one.

Weeks later I thought it had died down until a friend came across this, a message board linked to a cycling activists such as Critical Mass (there was another site but the link seems to be dead now).

Some of the comments weren’t very nice:

• It’s much funnier if you get this paper delivered, the photo of this fat **** makes it clear that he couldn’t ride a bike even if he wanted to…. (I guess we;re paying the price for all those kids who pciked on the little mummy’s boy at school……. here little Davy, mummy will give you a donut to stop your crting….)
• My real problem with opinions like this is I can’t think of anything constructive to say, only things like, “David, how can you be such a huge wanker, given that you’ve got such a small penis?” etc…
• Anyone still watch or remember the simpsons? I imagined that guy as the fat comic book seller!!! with that whiney annoying voice!

OK, THAT LAST ONE HURT!

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.

[...]

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.