fartlick

this entry doesn't have to do with stormicide's butt, but it is about instance of another eggcorn. i went in to get my teeth cleaned this last Wednesday. my dentist has a really nice setup: a nice chair that can move up, down, left, right, recline, etc. (which aides her in doing dental work), and a nice tv so a patient can zone out during any procedure being done on them. the channel is usually set to the Outdoor Network or set to a channel that runs programs that make you want to be outside and not at the dentist. anyway, this last time, the program was talking about an active lifestyle and giving pointers for various sports. after learning about some cycling workouts, the program moved on to running. one of the workouts they described was what's called a fartlek (the text on the the screen said fartlek is Swedish for "speed play"), and that was when i realized that i had been saying eggcorn ever since cross country during high school.

my buddies and i would do fartleks at least ten times a season, so they were not too uncommon, but i never once remember my x-country coach writing the word down. however, me and my fellow runners had always thought it was "fartlick", and made the typical juvenile jokes whenever we had to run them. anyway, for those who don't know, a fartlek is running at a fast pace for a certain distance, and then jogging for a short distance, and then running fast again, repeating this cycle for an extended period of time. so my teammates and i developed a reason why it was called a fartlick: you "lick the fart" of the person ahead of you when you are running fast and they have slowed down ahead of you. so we thought that when you jog slowly, that's when you let the farts out, and then the person behind you catches wind of it during his sprint (we usually did it around the track).

so anyway, our idea of why it was called "fartlick" was based on our ignorance of fartlek being a borrowed word. i google'd "fartlicks | fartlick", and got 155 ghits, while "fartleks | fartlek" got 34100 ghits. oddly enough, there seems to be an example of the "fartlick" spelling in a spanish context: Sistema Fartlick cambios de plano, alternando aer?bica y anaer?bica. so it seems that me and my teammates weren't the only ones who represented the spelling as "fartlick". yay for eggcorns and dental work!

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