High five

For decades, the "conventional wisdom"[3] has been that the origin of the high five occurred between Dusty Baker and Glenn Burke of the Los Angeles Dodgers at Dodger Stadium on October 2, 1977, the last day of the regular season.[3] In the sixth inning, Dusty Baker hit a home run off Houston Astros pitcher J. R. Richard. It was Baker's 30th home run, making the Dodgers the first team in history to have four hitters with at least 30 home runs each in a single season.[7] As journalist Jon Mooallem tells the story:

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 ... "So I reached up and hit his hand. It seemed like the thing to do."[3]

This story regarding the origin of the high five can be found in the written news as early as September 1982 and is featured in the ESPN 30 for 30 film The High Five directed by Michael Jacobs.[8] After retiring from baseball, Burke, who was one of the first openly gay professional athletes, used the high five with other gay residents of the Castro district of San Francisco, where for many it became a symbol of gay pride and identification.[3]

Another origin story, first reported in 1980,[9] places it at a University of Louisville Cardinals basketball practice during the 1978–1979 season.[3] Forward Wiley Brown went to give a 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.[3] High fives can be seen in highlight reels of the 1978–1979 Louisville team.[3] 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!"[3][10]

In a 2007 press release, two comedy writers and founders of the "National High Five Day" claimed that a late 1970s and early '80s basketball player from Murray State University had invented the gesture. They also concocted an elaborate and involved story about this player as a young boy learning the gesture from his father. But in a 2013 ESPN article, the pair admitted that it had been a publicity stunt. Per the article, the two had "scoured college basketball rosters to plug in a name."[3][11]

Antecedents of the physical gesture of slapping palms together predate the 1970s,[12][13] when the high five is believed to have been coined. For example, it can be seen in the 1960 French Nouvelle vague movie Breathless.[14] These earlier cases were never called "high fives," however, because the term had not yet been coined and they lacked the cultural context and meaning surrounding the gesture that originated in the United States during the late 1970s and 1980s independent of usage elsewhere.[3]

Conventional wisdom holds that the Tokyo district of Roppongi earned the slogan of "High Touch Town" after residents noticed World War II American soldiers walking the streets giving each other high-fives; when the Japanese asked about the gesture it was mistranslated as hai tatchi or "high touch".[15] This story is possibly apocryphal, as Hiroyuki Usui, a representative of the Roppongi Shopkeepers Promotion Association explains, "There is no deep meaning in 'High Touch Town'. People don't know what it means." The term "high touch town" may have originated before the high five and had a different meaning, or 'high touch' may mean "high class", a play on the town's reputation for nightlife activity among off-duty military personnel.[16]

The "too slow" variation is a sequence of high five and low five, often accompanied by a rhyme such as "Up High. Down Low ..."[24][25] During the down low sequence, the initiator will surprise the counter-party by pulling their hand back at the last moment, tricking the other person into swiping at empty air, completing the rhyme with "Too slow!" [26] There are variations on this theme, with additions of "to the side" and other hand positions for the partner to contact the initiator's hand.[27]

• 
  "Up high."
• 
  "Down low."
• 
  Victim misses.
• 
  "Too slow!" (with finger-guns)

The origin of the too slow variation has not been established, but notable sources have made reference to it; for example a 1983 journal is quoted as saying, "Whether we hammer, or hoe, whoop or holler, as they say, slap five up high, down low, you're too slow, we do it with the rhythmic motif that leads to harmony."[28] The title song for Lay on Five, a BBC children's television programme broadcast in 1985–86 featuring Floella Benjamin, ended "..too slow to Lay on Five."[29] The too slow variation is in the 1987 film The Principal in a scene where Principal Rick Latimer (James Belushi) does it to Arturo Diego (Jacob Vargas).[30] In the New York Times archives, the earliest reference is from 1993 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," at which point Schwarzenegger pulled his hand away saying "Too slow." The boy reportedly laughed.[24] Schwarzenegger did it originally in the 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, when John Connor (Edward Furlong) teaches the Terminator (Schwarzenegger) to "Gimme five. Up high, down low, too slow."[31] 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"[32] a slang term usually meaning something from a prior generation.[33]

The rhyme bears a striking resemblance to a very old rhyme, possibly medieval, used by blacksmiths to teach apprentices how to best operate a bellows in a way that maximized its efficiency by opening it fully and quickly, while closing it slowly. The didactic rhyme is "Up high. Down low. Up quick. Down slow; And that's the way to blow."[34][35]

Two women engaging in an air five

An air five is a variation where the hands of the participants never actually touch, needing only line of sight to make the gesture.[36] It has an advantage for participants who are otherwise too far apart to achieve physical contact at the moment of the gesture. The participants may simply pretend to high five, or add an imitation sound of hand slapping. Also known as the wi-five, a mix of "wireless" and "high five" with a pun on Wi-Fi, a wireless computer technology.[37][38]