

The bicycles are another thing they’re ignoring. If someone wanted to leave the area, why wouldn’t they go on their bicycle? It would be faster. Those people didn’t want to be in the road, and they wanted to get out of the road in enough of a hurry that they didn’t wheel their bicycles to the side.
Since they speak multiple languages, they probably spend quite a lot of time thinking about the subtle differences in meaning between words, so the precise meaning of the word “polyglot” no doubt matters quite a lot to them.