Sow … Cow?
I’m mortified to say that I’ve been watching a lot of olympic ice skating lately. Not the cool short-track kind, or even the boring time-trial kind with the funny-looking people in gumby suits, but the dancing kind, where there’s nothing actually happening except for skating around and jumping and twirling. It’s mind-numbingly dull: everyone does basically the same stuff to basically the same music, and the only real suspense is whose costume will out-ridiculous everyone else’s. My vote for these games goes to the ice dancer lady with the tasseled pasties layered on top of a flesh-covered bodysuit, but the Russians’ red and yellow ketchup-and-mustard-explosion-wear comes in a close second.
Nevertheless, I have to admit that a few of the female skaters are just amazing to watch. The best of them seem almost otherworldly when they perform, more spirits than women, ice dryads on a delicate incorporeal plane that just happens to touch our own, briefly, every four years.
So it’s really weird to hear the names that the skating establishment, in its questionable wisdom, has given some of the standard maneuvers. One of them in particular: the Salchow. It’s named after the Swedish skater who invented it, which is fine, but it’s pronounced sow-cow, which isn’t. When I see these diaphanous goddesses twirling gracefully through the air, I don’t want to think about pigs and cows. I really don’t. But some broadcaster always squeals triple sow-cow!, and shatters the whole thing.
Couple that unlovely image with the lutz, which sounds a lot like klutz, and the axel, which brings to mind garage-metal and grease, and you have a pretty good case for a complete overhaul of skating nomenclature. Maybe using more latinate roots this time. All these germanic names have too many hard consonants, too many throaty unpleasant syllables.
Or, someone could hire me to do it. I’d be quite happy to change things around a bit.
Announcer 1: Ok, now Yvette Foreskaya is about to execute a triple lutz followed by a quadruple sow-cow. And there she goes! Oh, perfect! Perfect!
Announcer 2: I don’t think I’ve seen anything so lovely since Irena Trantitritoff’s quintuple corkscrew farty-plop in the 2002 games at … OH MY GOD, was that a double-triple snotcramp?!!
Announcer 1: Yes it was! Absolutely lovely, George. And now she’s getting ready for her signature jump, the quadruple skunkpoop-stinkbladder. There she goes … OH NO! She’d down!
Announcer 2: Tragic, just tragic. I think that pretty much does it for Foreskaya. As she picks herself off the ice, you have to wonder, Melanie, whether she overreached here. No one’s attempted the stinkbladder since Olga Drankalangle dislocated her pelvis attempting it in the 1988 Olympics Games. …
Yeah. I’d take that contract in a second. And after I’m done with that, I’ll move on to ballroom dancing. Waltz? Box-step? Please.
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