[Leica] IMG: May Nawlins Wedding #1

[kididdoc at cox.net (Steve Barbour)]

now I feel like I know more than most Texans...:-)

Steve


On May 27, 2008, at 8:50 AM, Emilio Perea wrote:

> On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 08:12:41AM -0700, Steve Barbour wrote:
>> On May 26, 2008, at 1:19 PM, Peter Klein wrote:
>>> Just one thing I wanna know, and forgive my cultural ignorance.   
>>> What
>>> does the crooked "two fingers" sign in picture #55 mean?
>>
>> I wonder too,
>
> It's the "TCU football sign"
>
> Paul Burka's old article on Texas Monthly:
>
> Football Hand Signals
>
> The Southwest Conference may not have the best teams, but it does have
> the best school signs.
>
> Blame it all on an Aggie named Pinky Downs.
> A 1906 Texas A&M graduate, Downs was a member of the school's board of
> regents from 1923 to 1933. He was the kind of Aggie who wore a maroon
> tie every day and who prodded the school into spending an extra  
> $10,000
> so that its new swimming pool would be longer than the one at the
> University of Texas. When the Aggies had a yell practice before the  
> 1930
> TCU game, Downs naturally was there.  "What are we going to do the  
> those
> Horned Frogs?" he shouted. His muse did not fail him. "Gig 'em,  
> Aggies!"
> he improvised, appropriating a term form frog hunting. For emphasis,  
> he
> made a fist with his thumb extended straight up. The Southwest
> Conference had its first hand sign.
>
> The primordial image of sticking frogs with a spear captured the  
> essence
> of Aggieness--a good ol' farm boy who was not so much  
> unsophisticated as
> anti-sophisticated. When other schools later developed their own hand
> signs, the signals likewise started out as visual representations of
> school mascots. But they soon evolved into more. All those horns (long
> and frog), claws (bear and cougar), and the rest have become totems,
> symbols of belonging to a tribe. Or a sect: They are, to borrow a  
> phrase
> from The Book of Common Prayer, "an outward and visible sign of an
> inward and spiritual grace." In Texas it still matters what school you
> went to and who won the last game. That is why the Southwest  
> Conference,
> defiled though its reputation may be, remains the best habitat for  
> hand
> signals since charades. Of the nine SWC schools, more have hand signs
> (seven) than NCAA investigations (six). For that matter, one school,
> SMU, has more hand signs than football teams.
>
> For a quarter of a century after Pinky Downs's moment of inspiration,
> the Aggies had a monopoly on official gestures. But by 1955  
> archrival UT
> had fallen on hard times, made harder by a corresponding rise in the
> fortunes of A&M. A UT cheerleader named Harley Clark syllogized: (1)
> A&M has a hand sign, (2) A&M is winning, (3) UT has no hand sign,
> therefore (4) UT is losing. (Such reasoning prowess would later lead
> Clark, as an Austin judge in 1987, to conclude that the state's system
> of financing public schools was unconstitutional.) At a pep rally  
> before
> the TCU game, Clark held up his right hand in a peculiar way. The  
> index
> and little fingers were sticking up, while the thumb held down the two
> interior digits--the head of a Longhorn, Clark said. The creation  
> proved
> not to be the immediate answer to UT's football plight, however, as
> signless TCU won the next day, 47-20.
>
> Once A&M and UT had hand signs, everyone else wanted one. Even before
> 1955, SMU students had been raising their index and middle fingers  
> in a
> generic V for victory. By the late fifties, Mustang rooters had  
> changed
> the meaning to . . . pony ears.
>
> Baylor was next. In 1960 cheerleader Bobby Schrade came up with the  
> idea
> of holding the hand aloft with all five fingers curved to suggest a  
> bear
> claw. Only alcohol had a harder time getting accepted on the Baptist
> campus. For twelve years students and administrators argued whether  
> the
> sign was sufficiently dignified before it was formally blessed in  
> 1972.
>
> When the University of Houston was seeking admission to the conference
> in 1972, cheerleaders decided that U of H needed a hand sign, too. The
> result--the UT sign with the middle finger added--officially  
> represents
> a cougar claw; unofficially, it indicates the students' attitude  
> toward
> UT.
>
> At Texas Tech, members of a spirit organization called the Saddle  
> Tramps
> decided in 1971 that the Red Raiders were getting left behind.  
> Emulating
> Raider Red, the costumed mascot who discharges a brace of large  
> pistols
> after each Tech score, the Saddle Tramps began brandishing thumb-and-
> forefinger pistols of their own.
>
> TCU cheerleaders began experimenting with hand signs in 1980 on the  
> way
> to a cheerleading camp in Tennessee. To represent Horned Frogs, they
> first tried the UT sign with the outer fingers bent at the knuckles.  
> No
> good: it could be seen as an admission that TCU was only half as  
> good as
> UT. So they switched to bent index and middle fingers.
>
> Even Rice students occasionally use a sign, but it is not pictured  
> here
> because university officials, suspecting that a middle finger poked
> outward has a meaning other than "peck 'em, Owls", have declined to
> sanction it. Not surprisingly, the only conference school without a  
> sign
> is Arkansas, whose adherents have a state all to themselves and thus
> have no need to proclaim in sign language that they Belong.
>
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