Platform pedals will now be marketed as "Cliplessless Pedals".

Love it. When I first read your post, I thought it said "clipless" and I was about to comment that I thought "clipless" pedals were the ones with clips on them. Your comment is funnier.

Anyway, I just call the pedals you described "pedals."

Anticlipless power platforms ftw!

Like infinite trim shifters.

It's a feather in all our caps, i believe, that we got through four posts in this thread so far and no one has gone on a rant about how clipless is the only way to go and why people who ride platforms aren't real cyclists. Yay, us!

Fredals













Now before someone gets their panties in a twist, all my bikes have Fredals.

Me too, and a good pun is a good pun (at least I think it's a pun). I'm probably going to call them that.

BTW, the pedals with the dumb name is "clipless" Nothing against the technology, the name doesn't describe what they actually are.. .

Mine are constructed from dilithium crystals. Sure, the intergalactic mining costs a pretty penny, but....

I think it does (clipless), but only relative to historical context.

Toe clips used to be commonly used as a way to lock one's shoe to one's pedal. Naturally, Velo Orange has a selection of some rather nice ones. I'm sure there are a number of reasons why these went out of style, and I'm not a cycling history major, so I'll just jump to clipless pedals -- they offer a way to lock one's shoe to one's pedal without the use of toe clips. Thus, "clipless".

A cyclist not familiar with the old toe clips would look at a clipless pedal and wonder why the name, because the shoes pretty clearly "clip in" to the pedal. And we even say "clip in" and "clip out"...of clipless pedals. I think the "clipless" term is relevant, but again, only when taken in historical context.

I actually used toe clips for about a year, and hated them so much, I got rid of them, so I'm aware of the history. But, the fact remains that the name "clipless" doesn't actually describe what they are, and could just as accurately be applied to platform pedals. I think the real reason that the name clipless survives is because there is no good one-word description of the mechanism, and the obvious one "click-in" sounds too much like the clicking sound you hear when there's a pedal malfunction, so I suspect marketers steered clear of it.

I don't think you are referring to real platform pedals.These are real platform pedals. Lyotard Marcel Berthet. I used a pair of these. With toe clips. Platform non-clipless pedals.

Real or not, I think it's despicable how they used to torture blasphemists with those during the Middle Ages.

Could go with any of these to term in & describe it?
bare traps : Plant or uproot
sole locks : attach or detach
grippers ; get a grip or lose grip

I think it's funny how many bike parts are named for what they aren't with a -less tacked on.
Cotterless
threadless
clipless
tubeless

It's just a record of a lot of old bad ideas. If you've ever worked on a cottered crank, you would understand why "cotterless" is better. Same with threaded forks. And, honestly, toeclips were a royal pain in the hootenanny. In my opinion, the jury is still out on tubeless. There are too many warts to make it better than the replacement.

I would also say that "cotterless" is distant enough in the past that most people don't use the term nor know what it means. Most people talk about square taper, ISIS (not the group but the spline standard) and external bearing cranks.

I guess one day we will be cranking non-square spindles.

There is a three-year-old thread on bicycle misnomenclature which is still going. One of my "favorite" stupid bike terms is bottom bracket. It now refers to the bearing assembly, but it sure doesn't look like a bracket to me. The actual bottom bracket is now called the bottom bracket shell. Now, that's a bracket. Lugs were called brackets, and that hanger bracket was the lowest of all of them.

I'm sorry to inform you that I beat you to that joke by almost 3 years...

Thinking of going cliplessless

I rode for years with toe clips and cleats. I tended to not cinch them up as tight as possible in case of emergency.

Once upon a time, every cyclist knew what toe clips were, and clipless made sense to them.

what about SPDless? I feel like that's really the way of the future.

Well, seeing as I didn't intentionally steal the joke, consider it an homage!

"clips" was never a good word for what those were. "cages" is better, and "clip pedals" would have been a very good term for the newer technology if the original name hadn't taken it

In that case, I'm homaged! (Or is it honored? Before this post was I honor-less? Before the OP was I homage-less?)