Skiing: the art of catching cold and going broke while rapidly heading nowhere at great personal risk.

A wry, mock-definitional joke, the line treats “skiing” not as sport or recreation but as a costly, uncomfortable, and arguably pointless ordeal. By stacking miseries—catching cold, spending too much money, moving fast “nowhere,” and taking “great personal risk”—it satirizes the gap between skiing’s glamorous image (mountain resorts, athletic mastery) and the lived experience many associate with it (expense, weather exposure, injury risk). The humor depends on exaggeration and the faux-objective tone of a dictionary entry, turning a leisure activity into an absurd exercise in self-inflicted hardship.