I cleep, you cleep, he cleeps

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:31 AM -0400 9/18/10, Dave Wilton wrote:
>  >also: the sense of the word had shifted from "calling" the names of
>>the boys the captain wants on his side,
>>to that odd process of deciding which captain gets to call first.
>
>I was uncertain about a shift in sense.  Did the writer mean that the
>cleeping was the "tossing of the feet" to decide which captain chose
>first?  Or did he mean what followed -- the calling out of the chosen
>ones for one's team?
>
>To me the process doesn't sound much odder for boys who didn't own a
>bat than the one of my youth:  One captain placed his fist around a
>bat at some random point; the other his fist next to the first, and
>so on.

We (upper Riverside Drive, Manhattan, early-mid 1950s) used open
hands rather than fists, probably even more susceptible to chiseling.
But how did either party in your case hold the bat with his fist(s)?
Wouldn't gravity have been a problem?

>The one whose fist reached the end, preventing the other from
>grasping the bat, chose first.  But I confess the bat method always
>did seem a little odd to me -- tossing a coin would be faster, and
>less liable to chiseling.  (A sly lad might gauge the remaining
>distance and place his fist a little apart from the other's, or
>attempt to push the other's back a bit.)
>
>But perhaps impecunious lads didn't have pennies to toss, just as
>English lads would not have had a baseball bat -- although they might
>have had a quarterstaff.
>

I always figured the hands-climbing-a-bat method was to get us in the
right mood for the game.  But what do I know; I was just hoping not
to be the last chosen.

LH

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