the.com/motorist
A pedestrian who got a better offer and now hates pedestrians.
means A person who drives a car, especially considered as a user of the road.
from Coined around the 1890s, right alongside 'automobile,' by simply bolting the agent suffix '-ist' onto 'motor' — the same pattern that gave us 'cyclist' from 'cycle.' It was one of a flurry of new words (motorcar, motoring, motorist) minted to describe a brand-new kind of person the roads had never seen before.
- origin era
- term coined around 1895, before roads had paint
- legal status
- invented before traffic laws existed to govern it
- etymology
- borrowed suffix from novelty words like telegraphist
- irony
- cities redesigned for them, then blamed for congestion