Years ago, I recall car tyres being advertised here in New Zealand for their puddle-pumping properties on the back of siping – ‘aquajet radials’, I think they were branded. Of course all tyres do this and the marketing angle never ceased to intrigue me. It was about the time radials were becoming the norm as opposed to the old crossplies.
Our British English origins :-)….though, in our ‘wild west’ period of the 1860s, we used US spellings and terms – ‘drugstore’, ‘honor’, and so forth. There were a lot of US gold miners here at the time, but the origins of the practice seem to go back earlier than that – there was apparently a lot more ‘Pacific frontier’ interchange than we imagine these days.
One of the obscure English words I’ve discovered is sipe.
Matthew Wright 
All us savvy 4 x 4 truck owners know about siping. And any resident up here in the rainy Pacific Northwest SHOULD know.
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Years ago, I recall car tyres being advertised here in New Zealand for their puddle-pumping properties on the back of siping – ‘aquajet radials’, I think they were branded. Of course all tyres do this and the marketing angle never ceased to intrigue me. It was about the time radials were becoming the norm as opposed to the old crossplies.
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I love how Kiwis type “tyres” instead of “tires.” It turns basic auto shops all Game of Thrones.
“Puddle-pumping,” though. That sounds vaguely prurient.
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Our British English origins :-)….though, in our ‘wild west’ period of the 1860s, we used US spellings and terms – ‘drugstore’, ‘honor’, and so forth. There were a lot of US gold miners here at the time, but the origins of the practice seem to go back earlier than that – there was apparently a lot more ‘Pacific frontier’ interchange than we imagine these days.
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I drove through the cow pasture and emerged with the sipes on my tires filled with crap.
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Ewwwww! 🙂
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The nail caught in the sipe of my right rear tire caused a flat.
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