high-five

A high five between two U.S. Navy Sailors

The high five is a celebratory hand gesture that occurs when two people simultaneously raise one hand, about head high, and push, slide or slap the flat of their palm and hand against the palm and flat hand of their partner. The gesture is often preceded verbally by the phrase "Give me five" or "High five".

There are many origin stories of the high five,^[1] but the two best documented candidates are Glenn Burke of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team on Oct. 2, 1977, and Wiley Brown and Derek Smith of the Louisville Cardinals basketball team during the 1978-1979 season.^[2]

In the United States, there is an initiative to celebrate the third Thursday of April as National High Five Day.^[3]

Origin

The gesture probably originated in American professional sports. Picture of Drew Storen (right) and Wilson Ramos of the Washington Nationals (2011).

The use of the phrase as a noun has been part of the Oxford English Dictionary since 1980 and as a verb since 1981.^[4] The gesture takes its name from the "five" fingers and the raising of the hand "high". This is opposed to the "low" five which has been a part of the African-American culture since at least World War II.^[2] It's probably impossible to know exactly when the low first transitioned to a high, but there are many creation myths.^[2] Magic Johnson once suggested that he invented the high five at Michigan State.^[2] Others have suggested it originated in the women's volleyball circuit of the 1960s.^[2]

Glenn Burke and Dusty Baker

For decades, conventional wisdom was that the first high five occurred between Dusty Baker and Glenn Burke of the Los Angeles Dodgers on Oct. 2, 1977 in Dodger Stadium.^[2]

It was the last day of the regular season, and Dodgers leftfielder Dusty Baker had just gone deep off the Astros' J.R. Richard. It was Baker's 30th home run, making the Dodgers the first team in history to have four sluggers -- Baker, Ron Cey, Steve Garvey and Reggie Smith -- with at least 30 homers each. It was a wild, triumphant moment and a good omen as the Dodgers headed to the playoffs. Burke, waiting on deck, thrust his hand enthusiastically over his head to greet his friend at the plate. Baker, not knowing what to do, smacked it. "His hand was up in the air, and he was arching way back," says Baker, now 62 and managing the Reds. "So I reached up and hit his hand. It seemed like the thing to do."^[2]

After retiring from baseball, Burke, who was one of the first openly "out" homosexual professional athletes, used the high five with other homosexual residents of the Castro district of San Francisco, where for many it became a symbol of gay pride and identification.^[2]

Louisville Cardinals

Another origin story places it at a University of Louisville Cardinals basketball practice during the 1978-79 season.^[2] Forward Wiley Brown went to give a plain old low five to his teammate Derek Smith, but suddenly Smith looked Brown in the eye and said, "No. Up high." Brown thought, "yeah, why are we staying down low? We jump so high," raised his hand and the high five was supposedly born.^[2] High fives can be seen in highlight reels of the 1978-79 Louisville team.^[2] During a telecast of a 1980 game, announcer Al McGuire shouted: "Mr. Brown came to play! And they're giving him the high-five handshake. High five!"^[2]

Conor Lastowka

Recently the Burke story was challenged by Lamont Sleets, who played basketball for Murray State University. He claimed to be the originator of the high five in the 1960s because his father's Vietnam buddies were called The Five and the young Sleets would jump up and slap their hands and say "Hi, Five!".^[2] However the Sleets story was probably a hoax, a publicity stunt concocted by the founders of the "National High Five Day" (est. 2002)^[5] - they needed a 'founder' and so invented the story and plugged in Sleets name.^[2] "We just found the guy [Sleets] and made up a story," said Conor Lastowka, a founder of National High Five Day and professional comedy writer.^[2]

Antecedents

Antecedents of the physical gesture of slapping palms together predates 1970s (when the high five originated) for example it can be seen in the 1960 French Nouvelle vague movie Breathless.^[6] However these earlier cases were never called "high fives" because the term had not yet been coined,^[2] and they lack the cultural context and meaning surrounding a gesture that originated in America in the late 1970s and 1980s independent of usage elsewhere.

Variations

In addition to the standard high five several other types of "five" exist.

The "low five" had already been known since at least the 1920s, written evidence can be found in Cab Calloway's 1938 Hepster's Dictionary.^[7] In the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, actor Al Jolson is seen performing the low five in celebration of the news of a Broadway audition. In African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) this was known as "giving skin" or "slapping skin".^[7]

If one initiates a high five (or any variation thereof) by offering a hand(s), and no reciprocal hand appears to consummate the gesture, the initiator is said to have been "left hanging".^[8] This could be interpreted as an insult, friendly joke or form of enlightenment, depending on the context of its use.

Another variation is the "self high five". The action consists of raising one hand, generally the right hand, and tagging it with the other. It was often used by Diamond Dallas Page as part of his persona, such as in his WCW theme song "Self High Five".^[9] A variation of this variation was explored by Turkish artist Deniz Ozuygur who built a 'Self High-five Machine', which was exhibited in New York City in 2010.^[10] It is a robotic arm that spins in circles striking another robotic arm, both of which are rubber casts of Ozuygur's own arms.^[10]

The Eiffel Tower is a variation where the people complete the high five after extending their arms as high in the air as possible. Occasionally the words Eiffel Tower itself are said. An example of this was in an episode of the sitcom The IT Crowd.

"Too slow"

The "too slow" variation is a sequence of high five + low five, often accompanied by a rhyme such as "Up High. Down Low.."^[11][12] then, during the down low sequence, the initiator will surprise the counter-party by pulling their hand back at the last moment, thus tricking the other person to swipe empty air, completing the rhyme "Too slow!".^[13] There are variations on this theme, with additions of "at the side" and other hand positions for the partner to contact the initiator's hand.^[14]

The too slow variation of the high five originated sometime after the late 1970s, when the high five itself originated. Certain notable sources have made reference to it, for example in the New York Times archives, the earliest reference is from 1993^[11] when Arnold Schwarzenegger did it with the son of a film-crew member while on the set of Last Action Hero, saying: "Let's have five. Five high. Five low,"^[11] at which point Arnold pulled his hand away saying "Too slow." The boy reportedly laughed.^[11] Arnold also did it in the 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, when John Connor (Edward Furlong) teaches the terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) to "Gimme five. Up high, down low, too slow."^[15] The title song for Lay on Five, a BBC children's television programme broadcast in 1985–86 featuring Floella Benjamin, similarly ended "..too slow to Lay on Five".^[16] In 2008, They Might Be Giants released the song "High Five!" on an album for children titled Here Come the 123s, with lyrics "High five! Low five! Slap me five! Down low! Too slow!", a gesture described in the song as "old school"^[17] a slang term usually meaning something from a prior generation.^[18]

• 

  "Up high."

• 

  "Down low."

• 

  Victim misses.

• 

  "Too slow."

Air five

Two women engaging in an air five.

An air five (or fake-five) is a variation where the hands of the participants never physically touch, needing only line of sight to make the gesture. It has an advantage for participants who are otherwise too far apart to achieve physical contact at the moment of the gesture.^[19] The participants may simply pretend to high five, or add an imitation sound of hand slapping, similar to a physical high five, through mouth-noise or even by slapping the bottom of their forearms simultaneously.

References

External links

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