The Coining of the Term: UPD

A few years ago, I realized that there are times when unicyclists "fall" (splat!), and there are times when we "fall off but land standing." The first could easily be called a "fall" without confusion, but the second always seemed to deserve its own term. After all, most of the time when we lose balance, we land standing.

So in the summer of 2001, I began using the term "unplanned dismount" and writing "UPD" in parentheses after the term. I had never seen "unplanned dismount" in print before, so I assumed I had invented the term. I definitely invented the acronym "UPD," but it's clear I wasn't the only one thinking about this subject, because there are earlier cases of the spelled out version.

By late 2001 and early 2002, "UPD" was used in common parlance among unicyclists, and it has always been attributed to me. Dutch unicyclist (and avid writer on the unicyclist.com forum) Klaas Bil even wrote a funny note marking the anniversary of its use.

I never doubted Klaas's findings, including the date he gave for the coining of UPD (7 Nov, 2001), but today I discovered that I had used UPD even earlier. In an August 2001 note about landing technique, I answered:

"I have to disagree a tad on one point, JM, and that is about pedal posish.
If the pedals are at "6 o'clock," it's really hard to stick the landing.
At almost any other point it's not too tough, and 9:15 (or if you are a
late riser, 3:45) is the easiest. But I still have occasional 'unplanned
dismounts' (UPDs) off small curbs when I have to land at 6 o'clock. DS"

But going even further back, I found a post written in 1999 called My first major, um, unplanned dismount.

The 1999 post was written by someone who signed on as "ronknapperpub@usa.net."Only 2 people viewed his post at that time (I wasn't one of them). No one put the acronym UPD together until July of 2001, when I wrote a few posts about it including my entry in this thread.

For awhile I tried to keep separate the meanings of UPD and "fall," but eventually they got mixed up a bit so that nowadays people use "fall" to mean the splat variety of UPD and use UPD as a more generic term that doesn't usually involve the splat.

I hope this helps to confuse the matter more on the subject of UPDs. ;)