I cleep, you cleep, he cleeps

[Joel S. Berson]

At 9/18/2010 11:39 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>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?

Gee, Larry, in the upper Bronx, Van Cortlandt Park area, the two
captains alternated their right hands only.  One could hold the bat
with his left, and there would always be a second hand holding the
other end.  And we were on to open hand chiseling.

Joel

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