On your grid!

‘Quite a number of younger men (and older ones too) ride them regularly in and out of town despite the popular taunts of “Monkey on a gridiron.” ‘

I came across this quote this morning, Sunday 25 July 2021 (as mum pointed out, five months to Christmas! Heck.) in the book Melbourne Street Life by Andrew Brown-May (Australian Scholarly Publishing 1998). This quote comes from around the year 1900, and what it made me think of was the fact that Salv would refer to bikes every now and then as ‘grids’. I never pressed him about this, imagining it to be some weird transposition of the word ‘bike’. But this quote suggests that maybe it was a shortening of the term ‘gridiron’…

Discuss.