[Ads-l] Random query: "cripple (shot)"

[Jonathan Lighter]

HDAS has "cripple" from 1974 (heard from one of my college chums), but
undifferentiated "crip" (a cinch) from 1923.

JL

On Sat, Jun 27, 2015 at 3:34 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Random query: "cripple (shot)"
>
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>
> Has anyone else ever come across this or a variant - crip (shot) used in
> basketball as the term for a shot from a position so close to the basket
> and so conveniently situated as to make the shot unmissable, in any
> reasonable version of the universe? A shot that you'd miss only if you were
> otherly-enabled? Of course, the way that the game nowadays has rendered the
> crip obsolete. A player finding himself in that situation, today, would put
> up a 360 double-jam, in-yo'-face disgrace and not just flatfootedly bank it
> in off the backboard, in the manner of the old crip shot.
>
> I haven't heard it or used it in dekkids. Essentially, I'm wondering
> whether this was once a real, more-or-less technical term in general use
> among coaches and players of the game, at one time, or is/was it a slang
> term peculiar to colored, schoolyard-basketball players.
>
>
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
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