BIKE NOUN

In the British slang phrase on your bike (frequently written on yer bike): go away, push off, get away with you. Also, get on with it, 'pull your finger out'. Etymology: Originally a Cockney expression and typically graphic: the hearer should 'push off', and, in order to get away faster, should pedal, too. History and Usage: Although almost certainly in spoken use since the early sixties, the phrase on your bike did not start appearing in print at all frequently until the eighties, when it suddenly became a fashionable insult. It was probably made the more popular by a speech which Norman Tebbit (then UK Employment Secretary) made at the Conservative Party Conference in October 1981, pointing out that his father had not rioted in the 1930s when unemployed, but had 'got on his bike and looked for work'. This speech was also the cause of some confusion in the meaning of the phrase: whereas before it had always been a ruder (but not obscene) way of telling someone to push off or indicating that you did not believe a word of what they were saying (the senses in which it continued to be used by those in the know), it was now taken up by the press as a favourite clich÷ to be used in stories about anyone who was unemployed, and acquired the secondary meaning 'get on with it, make an effort'. In this secondary sense it is sometimes used as an adjectival phrase rather than an exclamation, to describe the attitude which Tebbit's remark betrayed. The first ever Tory prime minister who truly believes in pull-yourselves-up-by-your-bootlaces, she wants upwardly mobile, self-helping, on-yer-bike meritocrats. Financial Times 12 Sept. 1984, p. 24 On your bike Jake, I said, this joke has gone far enough. Punch 16 Oct. 1985, p. 44 'Wally son, it's Pim.' 'On your bike. Pim's doing five in Durham.' Tom Barling The Smoke (1986), p. 115