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Double meaning
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Which name for a sedan chair was also the name of a horse drawn vehicle?
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'Fly', perhaps. One meaning of the word was a light vehicle originally on hire in Brighton. At first they were drawn by men - which might supply the 'sedan chair' element - and later by a horse. The word was eventually applied to any one-horse carriage.
The word 'drawn' would suggest wheels rather than carrying, of course, so it sounds as if it was the British equivalent of a rickshaw! Could that be it?
St. Fiacre : Of Irish origin, he emigrated to France and retired as a hermit in the forest of Brie, on the present site of Saint-Fiacre-en-Brie (Seine and Marne). His reputation for holiness soon attracted a lots of visitors. He prayed with them, gave them advice, treated them, and with the help of God cured them. After his death, he was invoked for curing haemorrhoids, and pilgrims came from very far, to sit on the stone where he had been sitting, hoping this contact would relieve their pain. For the record, in 1640, a Parisian, replaced the sedan-chair, by carriages that were hired by the hour: 'hackney-carriages' called fiacres in French because they all started from and went back to the Hotel Saint-Fiacre, located in the rue Saint-Antoine. He is the patron of gardeners and is still invoked against haemorrhoids.
Pentagon, I'm afraid that neither The Oxford English Dictionary nor Chambers gives support to the idea of 'fiacre' ever having been a name for a sedan-chair. Is there some specific reason for your notion that the word begins with 'f'? Does it, for example, have to fit into a crossword grid in a situation where the 'f' is already there?
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