You have picked your nits' arses before their faces. Tubeless differentiates from the tubed clincher which preceded it (and which needed a name to differentiate it from tubulars and, I think, from the non-clinching tyres used way back before hooked rims). Compact differentiates from the once dominant larger double (say 53-39). All four (five counting tubular) are quite logical terms.
Then let me elaborate. “Tubeless” is fine (of course it is!). The problem is that some people now talk about “clinchers” when they mean to exclude tubeless clinchers.
“Should I use clinchers or tubeless for my world tour?” That’s not fine, since it breaks the meaning of the language (and for no gain, either). Tubeless is a subset of clinchers. Don’t put them at odds with each other.
Likewise, “compact” is a perfectly good label. The problem, again, is using “double” to exclude compacts. A compact is a type of double, not an alternative to it.
I’m not a Nazi about these things, but I hate lazy, unthinking writing. As a time-saving rule, the sort of people who are casual with these terms have nothing interesting to say.
IAMFI!
Now,
that annoys me! And Googling it for a clue, I see one of the search results is purple to remind me I already did so before.
I’ll make exceptions for people like
Kim, whose use of language is careful, hilarious, and the opposite of lazy even though it’s replete with acronyms.
Brucey, technical sage that he is, has a vexatious addiction to acronyms. I need to Google half of them. Some of them resist even that effort.
In French, people sometimes end their email to me with “Cdlt”, which I assume they think means “Cordialement” but certainly does not. There is nothing cordial about being too lazy to do me the courtesy of writing out the word,
especially when the only purpose of the word is to convey courtesy.
