Asswimming

December 2010

Everything is going swimmingly. The Department of Disinformation is back! We apologise for our lack of disinformation, but in the kerfuffle surrounding the building of the new website the Department was mistakenly put in a box and stacked in a cupboard with Werd the Robot and some cleaning equipment. We eventually persuaded Werd to help us escape, but it wasn't easy. That is one very grumpy robot.

Word o' the Month: swimming

Swimming first evolved as a way to avoid drowning. It then developed as a method to avoid being eaten. An early stone age painting in a cave in Laux, France, shows a dramatic sequence of events in which human-like stick figures run from a large toothed beast. The paintings then show the figures in water with fish jumping all around them and the beast standing on the edge of the water, foiled. (Later illustrations show the stick figures being devoured by the fish – a sadly common occurrence until the invention of swimming pools.)

Early swimming styles most commonly resembled a sideways sort of dog-paddle, but one stinking hot day in 10 AD an Egyptian farmer named Asswim was resting on the banks of a large reed-edged irrigation pond when he noticed the action of a frog paddling by. Asswim was hot and sweaty after a morning chasing his frisky goats, and so he took off his clothes and followed the frog into the water, imitating its pulling arms and kicking legs. And there, amongst the reeds, asswimming was invented. 

Asswimming, or breaststroke as we now know it, was the main style of swimming until the end of the 19^th century. (You could say all swimming was asswimming.) In 1835 The first man to asswim the English channel, Captain Matthew Webb, asswam it very slowly, taking over 21 hours. He later died rather foolishly attempting to asswim across the whirlpool at the bottom of Niagara Falls.

But before then, in 1790, Englishman Reginald Freestyle had been on an expedition exploring the upper reaches of the Amazon River. There he was astounded to see the native Americans make their way across the wide river in a style he described as “windmill-like, rather undignified, and causing a lot of splashing.” When he demonstrated the 'infinitely more elegant” asswim, or breaststroke, the Natives all fell about on the banks of the river laughing and shouting at him in their guttural language. “Too slow!” they yelled, “too slow!” Reginald soon realised what they meant as scores of small but feisty piranhas took bite-sized chunks of flesh from his frog-like legs. Thus the American Crawl, or Freestyle, was born. (It was not accepted quickly by folk in Europe or Britain, who considered it 'uncivilised' because a.) it had been invented by heathens, and b.) there are no piranhas in Europe.

Other styles of what we now call swimming – butterfly and backstroke, evolved even later.  Butterfly was so called because of the amounts of insects collected by the wide flailing arms of the swimmer, and was developed by show-offs who thought the other styles were too easy to master. Backstroke (the title is self-explanatory) was invented by astronomer and cloud-watcher Beverly Clear, who liked to swim at night. 

Have a fantastic asswimming summer! If there are flags, asswim between them! And wear Thunderwear swimwear – safe and good looking too!