Cycling

Le guidon is the entry on this page an English reader already owns, and owns in the wrong sense. « Guidon » exists in English: it is the small pennant carried by a cavalry troop or a squadron, and the soldier who rides with it. English took the word from French in the sixteenth century, when un guidon was exactly that — a standard, itself borrowed from Italian guidone, built on guida, the guide, because the flag was the thing a line of horsemen followed. English kept that meaning and let the word stiffen inside military ceremony. French kept the word working: from the flag it moved to the bead a rifleman lines up along his barrel, le guidon du fusil, and from there, late in the nineteenth century, to the bar a cyclist steers by. The same noun, held at two ends of four hundred years. One further thing to carry across, because it catches people out in speech: le guidon is a singular, and the English for it is a plural — « the handlebars are too low » — with the singular surviving only in front of another noun, as in « a handlebar moustache ».