The Types of Jaywalkers
/The jaywalker
The Veerer
The Plodder
The retroactive
The runner
The butters
The swaggerers
We walk amongst them all and it is never more ever-present than when moving amongst the masses in a big city. Especially, when we are in a hurry, do we notice the annoying nature of these people the most. However, the problem is ours, because we are all one of these walking types at some point. Next time you are waking in the big city, amongst the masses take note, instead of annoyance.
" . . . the history of pedestrian nuisances is a long and colorful one. The very term “jaywalker” — after jay, a silly person — was coined on August 3, 1924, in a New York Times editorial about the proliferation of pedestrian menaces."
In “The Confusion of Our Sidewalkers: And the Traffic Problem of the Future in the Erratic Pedestrian,” the original 1924 article by M. B. Levick writes:
"There are the veerers who come up sharply in the wind and give no signal. The runners who dash to a goal and then dash back again without even tagging another “it.” The retroactive, moving crabwise. Those who flee and turn swiftly to victory, making a commonplace of the ruse that gave Joe Choynski his fame in the ring. Left-ends and butters, the people who never met the Marquis of Queensberry and to whom Greco-Roman is more foreign than jiu-jitsu.
As mad as the satellite particles of an atom and amid each group, like a nucleus, a static type. The plodder, trudging through Times Square as o’er the lee and knowing neither near side nor off side. The inferiority complexes whose only sense of power is to make the world walk around them. Children of the cigar store Indians standing stock still, so that a couple passing must say “Bread and butter!” Others who are to movement what the color blind are to light and the swaggerers who in an earlier age would take the wall, but in this present confusion must take wall and gutter and all between to assert their precedence."
Here is the full article on Brainpickings.
The Four types of Jaywalkers. Maria Popova
https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/09/26/jaywalkers-wendy-macnaughton-1924/
