preadolescent "tortures"

Margaret Lee mlee303 at YAHOO.COM
Mon Oct 2 08:50:24 UTC 2006


We did something called putting a "frog" in someone's arm. It was done by hitting/chopping your friend's upper arm (biceps) with the edge of your open hand.  If you struck hard enough, you could see the muscles in the arm jump up (the"frog"). Needless to say, if done correctly, this was a very painful activity.

  Margaret Lee

"Mullins, Bill AMRDEC" <Bill.Mullins at US.ARMY.MIL> wrote:
  >
> 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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