preadolescent "tortures"

[Jonathan Lighter]

I remember the phrase "one for flinching" but don't associate it with any particular activity.

  JL

"Mullins, Bill AMRDEC" <Bill.Mullins at US.ARMY.MIL> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Mullins, Bill AMRDEC"
Subject: Re: preadolescent "tortures"
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>
> We did something like this with those big plastic combs that
> we carried around in our back pockets during the Seventies
> and Eighties.
> You'd rest the comb on the top of the other person's fist.
> You'd try pick up the comb and smack the fist with it before
> they could move their hand.
>


The faculty at my elementary school came down hard on this one.
Participants would do it until the comb broke the skin, and you bled.
The rumor was that someone got "blood poisoning", which, although none
of us knew what it was, it must have been pretty bad.


>
> Also flinching. You'd make like you were going to hit
> someone, they'd shy, duck, or flinch and then you'd have the
> right to say "one for flinching" and hit them as hard as
> possible on the upper arm.
>

The characters in "Stand by Me" (the movie) do this, although I can't
remember if it occurs in the original Stephen King story "The Body" (but
it sounds like something he would have written about).

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