here's your chance to coin a new word. I'm closing in on the completion of a 1st draft and during this WIP I have been calling the hero's home-made conveyance an 'air bike'. This is a lousy, lazy moniker and needs to be cut ASAP. Some background you say? We're looking at an agricultural community 150 years into a world-wide drought. The young hero and his grandfather scrounged together a variety of old farm implements and one basket-case Harley Davidson motorsickle ('64 Panhead ) to build a hovercraft of sorts for a personal transport. Air bike just seems lame.
When I deal with a situation like this I usually start with a thesaurus and just go through synonyms. Maybe using words like glider, hover, breeze and stratosphere may help?
In It Happened One Night (1934 movie) a small one-seater helicopter type craft was called an "Autogyro" which I think may have been a real name for such a craft. So, perhaps a GyroChopper?
Hoverike Airboss Gravabike Streamer Combine Hovester Airtrac Cloud Barrow Chicken Killer Cow Scorcher Firetail Corn Burner Any of the above preceded by 'Harley'.
Aero bobber I could work with this. Airboss This too. Floathog. Gramp's is a pig-farmer so this too has potential. Chicken Killer Cow Scorcher Corn Burner I like the theme but we'd have to work the flora/fauna angle a little harder.
This might be getting a little advanced for your needs, but depending on the tone and setting of your writing/story, is it worth considering what types of words these guys would actually name a flying motorcycle? Has society collapsed at all during this 150 year-long drought, are the guys who built it kind of 'country hick' style? The characters giving it a 'model name' sounding title like A Stratocycle or A Gravbike, etc (as per some other's suggestions) might be a little different from the characters giving it an 'affectionate name', like The Chicken Killer or The Hairdryer (again, as per some other's suggestions). I guess I'm explaining my point a little poorly, but I think you can maybe get what I mean. If they're slightly more bumpkin country guys or the setting is kind of a Mad Max world, they might be more inclined to name it something grandiose and 'badass' like Chicken Killer/Hairdryer, where as if they're more like civilized men of engineering, they might give it a 'real' name, like Stratocycle/Gravbike.
Oh wait, I looked through some of the other posts and read about the character being a pig farmer. Time for some porcine puns: Air-Boar Hoverham Pork Wing Black Gammon (if it has a sleek black paint-job) Sky Squealer (if it makes a suitable noise at high RPM) Smokey Bacon (if it has an emissions problem)
And that's the angle I'm taking now. We're only on the first draft and have plenty of time for changing things, especially names. The setting is isolated Mega-cities connected by high-speed rail and sparse rural food production in between; much like it is now in the American West but world wide and much drier.
