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

[Joel Berson]

I'm familiar with "cripple", but not with "crip" (although I certainly would have understood the latter had I heard it)..  But I didn't play schoolyard basketball with coloreds.  I must have heard "cripple" on the radio (confession: as a young teen I used to listen in bed to Knicks' games, clandestinely because my parents didn't approve of my staying awake so late), or -- less likely -- on TV.  


Joel

      From: Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
 To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU 
 Sent: Saturday, June 27, 2015 3:34 AM
 Subject: [ADS-L] Random query: "cripple (shot)"
   
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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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org