(Published some time after the scheduled date.)<\/p>\r\n
A few months back<\/a>, I mentioned some decidedly off-color college cheers, as well as some that sound like they'll be off-color but turn out not to be. (I neglected to mention one apparently by Robin Williams: \"Rickum, rackum, rockum, ruckum \/ get that ball and really fight<\/em> 'em! \")<\/p>\r\n But I didn't have space in that column to discuss geek cheers, and other fight songs and cheers of a sort you probably wouldn't encounter in the upper echelons of college sports.<\/p>\r\n Some such are extremely simple. Aaron Hertzmann provides these alternate lyrics to the tune of the Rice Fight Song:<\/p>\r\n Fight fight fight, (Which reminds me that no discussion of college fight songs could be complete without a passing reference to Tom Lehrer's \"Fight Fiercely, Harvard.\" Consider such reference made.) A tradition of cheerleaders everywhere is to have the audience spell something out, one letter at a time. Some places take that to extremes, as with this other Rice cheer:<\/p>\r\n Gimme a W-I-L-L-I-A-M-M-A-R-S-H-R-I-C-E-I-N-S-T-I-T-U-T-E-F-O-R-T-H-E- A-D-V-A-N-C-E-M-E-N-T-O-F-A-R-T-S-L-E-T-T-E-R-S-A-N-D-S-C-I-E-N-C-E! What's that spell?<\/p>\r\n Another spelling cheer, from Hahvahd:<\/p>\r\n H-A-Ah, And another from my alma mater, Swarthmore College<\/a>:<\/p>\r\n Gimme a SWARTH! Gimme a MORE! What's that spell?<\/p>\r\n Swarthmore has other silly cheers as well, some of which were perpetrated by its short-lived Pep Band. Larry Miller, who was involved in the Pep Band, recalls:<\/p>\r\n At Basketball games (and [occasionally] football...), when the crowd would chant \"Defense!<\/em>\" we would answer \"Social spending!<\/em>\"<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n There was some discussion of using this one, but apparently they decided against it:<\/p>\r\n Fight, fight, for the inner light! Some of the other Swarthmore cheers may have originated elsewhere. This one may come from Atlanta:<\/p>\r\n Sophocles, Pericles, Peloponnesian War, (One of Swarthmore's school colors is garnet.) There are a lot of geeky cheers from various geeky schools. One fairly widespread one, which has multiple variants:<\/p>\r\n Repel them! Repel them! Or in a similar vein, from Williams:<\/p>\r\n Progress the ball, progress the ball, A lot of less than athletically renowned schools use this one:<\/p>\r\n It's all right, it's okay, you will work for us someday!<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n This is the sort of thing I'd expect to hear from Caltech or MIT, but apparently was encountered at Princeton:<\/p>\r\n Integration, derivation, There are many variations on that cheer, such as:<\/p>\r\n e to the x, dx, dx Which can also end with:<\/p>\r\n Integral! Radical! Mu, DV Or:<\/p>\r\n Square root, cube root, log of pi One more variant:<\/p>\r\n Square root, tangent, hyperbolic sine, (I don't even know what a slipstick is... Some techie I am.)<\/p>\r\n Somewhere between the geek cheers and the off-color cheers comes this one:<\/p>\r\n Abstinence, celibacy, There are a bunch of other entertaining cheers where I found that one, on the Williams College Mucho Macho Cheer Sheet.<\/a><\/p>\r\n Tech schools don't always do very well in football, even when they have good cheers. Fortunately, they can excel in other ways on the football field: notably in the area of pranks. There's a lovely story about one of the best college pranks of all time that's told in both Neil Steinberg's out-of-print If at All Possible, Involve a Cow: The Book of College Pranks<\/a> <\/cite>and in The Jargon File, version 4.2.0<\/a>. It seems that for the 1961 Rose Bowl, the University of Washington Huskies had organized a set of card displays: 2000+ audience members would each have a set of colored cards and an instruction sheet saying when to hold up what card. The team's cheerleaders would announce the number of a display; each audience member would look at their instruction sheet to see what color they were supposed to hold up for that display. The result was that each card became, essentially, a pixel in a giant grid, capable of showing images or words. Caltech students broke into the room where the instructions for the card displays were kept, and replaced those instructions with a modified set. They changed three of the displays: the image of the team mascot, the husky, was modified slightly to look like the Caltech mascot, the beaver; the display of the word HUSKIES was changed so it appeared backwards; and the display of the word WASHINGTON was changed to say CALTECH. Nobody knew that the substitution had been made until the displays were called, on live national television....<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-6-uuuppercase-3"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2798"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3527,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2798\/revisions\/3527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\r\n
\r\n fight fight fight,
\r\n fight fight fight fight fight.
\r\n Fight, fight fight,
\r\n fight fight fight fight fight -- fight fight fight.
\r\n Fight fight fight,
\r\n fight fight fight,
\r\n fight fight fight fight fight.
\r\n (... final verse omitted ... )
\r\n Go Rice!<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n
\r\n H-A-Ah,
\r\n H-A-Ah,
\r\n V!
\r\n V-A-Ah,
\r\n V-A-Ah,
\r\n V-A-Ah,
\r\n D!<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n
\r\n
\r\n Kill, Quakers, kill!<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n
\r\n x squared, y squared, H2<\/sub>SO4<\/sub>,
\r\n Three point one four one five nine,
\r\n Come on, Garnet, hold that line!<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n
\r\n Require them to relinquish the spheroid!<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n
\r\n Perambulate over the turf!<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n
\r\n
\r\n L'Hospital's rule, fight! <\/em>
\r\n e to the x,
\r\n e to the x,
\r\n e to the x, dy, dx,
\r\n Cosine, secant, tangent, sine,
\r\n Three point one four one five nine,
\r\n Label the axes y and x,
\r\n Hell with football, we want sex!<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n
\r\n e to the y, dy
\r\n Cosine, secant, tangent, sine,
\r\n Three point one four one five nine,
\r\n e, i, radical, pi
\r\n Fight 'em, fight 'em, WPI!<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n
\r\n Slipstick! Slide rule! MIT!<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n
\r\n Dis-integrate them, R.P.I.! (or, Schaumburg High!)<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n
\r\n Three point one four one five nine,
\r\n e to the x, dy, dx,
\r\n Sliderule, slipstick, Tech, Tech, Tech!<\/i><\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n
\r\n Don't let them score.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n