preadolescent "tortures"

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Mon Oct 2 13:19:52 UTC 2006


We did the same thing in Saint Louis, except that we did it to
<blush!> ourselves. I don't recall the rationale behind doing it to
ourselves as opposed to doing it to other people, but, there it is. We
used the karate-chop method described by Margaret.

-Wilson

On 10/2/06, Margaret Lee <mlee303 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Margaret Lee <mlee303 at YAHOO.COM>
> Subject:      Re: preadolescent "tortures"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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--
Everybody says, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange
complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is knows how deep
a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our
race. He brought death into the world.

--Sam Clemens

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