My grandson and I always try to come up with new ones. Reverse five, backwards five, upside down five, inside out ten. Gives him the giggles.
Dennis
Dusty Baker is often credited with being one of the co-creators of the high five. The Washington Nationals used that fact in some TV ads when Dusty was manager here. IIRC, give me five started out in the black community and then found it’s way on to TV like Acsenray said, in addition to those shows, I think I remember Lamont giving five a lot on Sanford and Son. I remember variations like “give me a hundred” where the other person had to slap both your palms ten times. It was a simpler time.
I’m not black but I remember “Give me five on the black hand side” from early 70s. You turned your hand palm down.
Also TV shows had skits where there would be vast elaborate greeting rituals between two black men involving slapping, bumping, elbows, even butts for the punchline. But in the early or mid 70s it’s notable that these skits had no high five.
Interesting connection, the claim is that the High Five was invented by Glenn Burke, to celebrate when Dusty Baker hit a home run.
About Glenn Burke -
“Burke was the first and only MLB player to come out as gay to teammates and team owners during his professional career and the first to publicly acknowledge it, stating, “They can’t ever say now that a gay man can’t play in the majors, because I’m a gay man and I made it.” He died from AIDS-related causes in 1995.”
I distinctly remember in the '70s, the 3-Part Soul Shake:
- Grasp hands at a 45 degree angle with interlocking thumbs.
- From the above, slide into a conventional handshake
- Then pull your hands apart, except pause to grip fingertips, bent at the first knuckle.
Yeah, I never mastered it and it did keep me out of 3 colleges.
As shown at the 2:22 mark of this trailer for the 1973 film of the same name. (There’s also a “gimme ten” at 2:08.)
It seems to me that the high five has been totally replaced by the fist bump.
Now, see, I remember the sequence as beginning with the conventional handshake, pivoting to the thumb grip, and then sliding into the finger grip.
At least, I’m pretty sure that’s the way my dad taught it to me, and he claimed to have learned it from a West Indian he did National Service with in the Fifties.
NPR Marketplace story. (Better to listen than to read.) The interview agrees with Wikipedia, inso far as Wiki suggests Glenn Burke as a contender as the originator.
There’s a link to the page with Michael Jacobs’ 10-minute documentary.
Steve Wilson?
Dude. My mind is blown.
I was born in 1978 and I thought high-fives went back…uh, 50 years at least? I mean, didn’t baseball teams in the 1920’s do it?
I believe it…but I am stunned.
It changed at the same rate as skateboarding, slang speech or ebonics, and other things that evolve. They were all a lot different 50 years a go.
My first memory of it was with Olympic volleyball teams in the sixties. I don’t remember it being used before but it spread pretty quickly and there were a million variants. My best buddy and I did a low one-finger touch after a good play.
I’ve been surprised before how quickly such things take hold and seem to have been around forever. I don’t recall the term ‘high five’ as a child so it doesn’t surprise me that it started in the late 70s, but lots of slang started when I was young in the 50s and 60s and seemed to be forever part of the language at the time. As a child I don’t recall putting much consideration into when the words and phrases started though.
This makes sense. The first time I remember hearing about it was the Dodgers doing it in the early '80s.
Good lord,* bowling leagues* were doing it by the seventies.
I wasn’t part of one, but I have to guess that they were working on the transition from hand shakes to slapping five for just about the whole decade.
Also, let’s make sure we’re not conflating the High 5 with the Gimme 5. The Gimme 5 (waist high, hands horizontal) has been around forever. The High 5 (vertical, head-height) is the more recent development, credited to Dusty Baker & Glenn Burke.
I think Gimme five was from african american influences. I don’t think it was in general use until the hippie era, when younger and/or hipper people began to do it instead of shake hands. To replace the habit of shaking hands, however temporarily, in the US anyway, was a big deal. The notion didn’t even exist to do it over the head until after it had been metabolized at waist level.