I can finally mark this one off my list!  It was keeping me up nights.

I was so excited the arm-swinging riddle had been solved — because people look so cool when they don't swing their arms — I told one of my co-workers from Eastie about it.

"I have a friend who swings her arms wicked," she told me. "But I blame it on Dorchester. They got that walk."

I told her researchers had "built a mechanical model to get an idea of the dynamics of arm-swinging and then recruited 10 volunteers, who were asked to walk with a normal swing, an opposite-to-normal swing, with their arms folded or held by their sides."

"Retahded," she said.

Not so fast!  The findings: not swinging your arms requires 12 percent more metabolic energy than swinging them does.  So, maybe they know something in Dot they don't in Eastie?