Giving someone a high five feels like the perfect way to celebrate some accomplishment—so natural that it must have descended through time immemorial, back to toga-bedecked, ancient Greeks slapping raised palms in the Parthenon. But no. Some people will be surprised to learn that the phrase “high five” didn’t enter the dictionary until 1980. The earlier evolution of the gesture—the “low” five—had existed since WWII as a youthful twist on the handshake. But starting in the 1970s, the high five began to appear among professional sports players, and from there spread into the popular culture. The first slap heard round the world may have been on Oct. 2, 1977 in Dodger Stadium. That was the day when Dusty Baker hit his 30th home run of the season, which made the Los Angeles Dodgers the first team in history to have three players hit that mark in a single season. As he ran back toward the plate, his friend and teammate Glenn Burke was there, hand reached out in celebration, and Baker—wanting to return the gesture, somehow—reached up his own hand and slapped it. There are other athletes who also claim to have done the first high five, and it’s more than likely that it was spontaneously invented in several places independently. But whatever the case, it is clearly a gesture whose time had come.
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