Slap Me Some Skin:A Brief History of Hand Gestures, Part 3

The first time someone saw two men slapping their palms together in greeting, one single thought inevitably bubbled its way up from the primordial ooze:

What the fuck was that?

Yes indeed, what the fuck was that? And more importantly, who started this crazy shit? Good question, and good of me to ask it. However, one cannot begin to discuss the history of the high-five without first exploring the origin of its parent gesture, the handshake.

The handshake is a gesture with a long and storied history, dating back to ancient times when everyone hated everyone. Mothers and sons, fathers and brothers, anyone could kick your ass and take your muffins at any time. These were brutal times and people behaved accordingly, ruthlessly exploiting the weak and dickless. It was a bad time to wear open-toed sandals.

During these harsh times, whenever two people approached on a country road, or in the livingroom, there began a dance where the participants would circle each other cautiously, right hands at the ready on their weapon of choice, be it a sword, a dagger, or a book of pithy puns. If, in the verbal parrying that ensued, it was determined that the threat of being beaten into fruit leather was acceptably minimal for both parties involved, the two people would then extend their empty weapon-hands and shake them, as a way of saying "I'm too tired to kill you today" or "I can't get this smell off my hand."

Eventually, after hundreds of years, the traditional handshake began to fall behind the accelerating pace of modern life. Basketball games were slowed down unacceptably since entire teams were constantly stopping the game to shake hands after a successful slam dunk. And in normal public life, too many jokers were doing that thing where they rub their middle finger on the inside of your wrist while shaking hands, which feels really perverted. An increasingly homophobic population was also growing less comfortable with the thought of men touching each other's hands for entire seconds at a time. Could a cockshake really be that far off?

The time had clearly come for a new, modern greeting, something quick, violent, and devoid of intimacy. Nature wasted little time filling this vacuum in the form of University of Louisville forward Derek Smith in 1980. Angry over being pantsed by fellow teammate Hubert Sanders on the previous play, Smith took a running leap at Sanders mid-court, in an attempt to punch Sanders' nose into the back of his shorts. Due to Smith's poor motor control and Sanders' serendipitous choice of that moment to wave to his girlfriend in the stands, the would-be beat-down resulted instead in a thunderously loud palm-on-palm slap that all present mistook as intentional.

So dramatic and unexpected was the gesture that it energized the crowd and soon caught on nationwide, with Smith and Sanders playing along since Sanders had no idea what had happened and Smith didn't want anyone to know he was that big of a gimp. The truth didn't come out until years later, when Smith was pantsed at a book signing in Michigan in 1993, and responded by high-fiving an elderly woman in the face who was waiting in line to buy a John Grisham book on tape.

Since that fateful day, the high-five and its low-five and non-altitude-specific variants have become ubiquitous in modern life, from urban culture and youth sports leagues to the embarrassing climax of many a John Tesh concert. Due in no small part to the gesture being co-opted by such blanchingly uncool impostors of the funk as Tesh and living duck decoy Bob Sagat of television near-personality fame, intricate and complex handshakes, complete with high and low slaps, snaps, fist-hits and pointing were developed in the inner cities to keep white people everywhere feeling lame and inadequate for the foreseeable future.

In recent years, the gesture has continued to evolve, with the traditional high-five now being used almost exclusively in sporting events and corporate seminars. In hip-hop culture, the high-five has been replaced entirely by the fist-hit, a "less-faggy" gesture residing more comfortably near to the border between violence and greeting. At our current pace, by 2050 we'll have come full-circle with the re-acceptance of the "kick in the face" greeting popular in ancient times. And with any luck, I'll be long dead by then, or at least cryogenically frozen in a threatening pose. Good day.

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