Chick Chat with Karen Linamen

I spent Saturday morning in Manitou Springs, Colorado at the Annual Emma Crawford Coffin Race where I joined several thousand people to watch an hour of white-knuckle competitive racing featuring three dozen homemade coffins on wheels.

I learned a lot while I was there.

For instance, I learned that the real Emma Crawford lived in Manitou until her untimely death in 1890 and that--when her dying request was to be buried at the top of Red Mountain--her fiance and eleven other men worked in shifts to carry her remains 7200 feet to the summit. After nearly forty years of rain and erosion, the granite at the top of the peak gave way and Emma's bones washed down the side of the mountain. She's buried now in Manitou. No wonder coffins on wheels are the theme of an event honoring a woman who traveled as much after death as she did.

But that's not all I learned.

When one of the coffin racing teams consisted of 12 men dressed like Elvis, I was informed that a single man dressed like The King is called an "Elvis" but more than one are referred to as "Elvii." This is because "Elvii" has been officially designated as the plural form of the word Elvis.

I don't know what's scarier: The fact that I've lived 47 years without this crucial bit of information, or the fact that there's even a need to come up with a plural form of the word Elvis.