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

Mullins, Bill CIV (US) william.d.mullins18.civ at MAIL.MIL
Sun Jun 28 06:33:29 UTC 2015


I grew up in Nashville in the 1970s, and went to integrated schools.  I certainly heard crip used in this way from the bruthas.



----- Original Message -----
From: Wilson Gray [mailto:hwgray at GMAIL.COM]
Sent: Saturday, June 27, 2015 03:34 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: Random query: "cripple (shot)"

---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
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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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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