The Boys State Basketball Tournament begins this morning. With the madness comes a curious lingua franca, a way for players from schools bigger than most Nebraska towns to communicate with players from schools in those towns.

"Shooting the rock," "missing a bunny" or "riding the pine" mean exactly the same thing at Bellevue West as they do at Bruning-Davenport. "Crossovers" and "treys" at Creighton Prep are the same as they are in Callaway. Every town in Nebraska with a gym has a neighborhood known as "the rack," "the hole" or "the iron." And if "throwing it down," "flushing it" or "slamming it" is your thing, expect 10 feet to be the distance you'll have to cover regardless of where you are.

So hoops fans and not-so-much hoops fans, get ready for three days of young men in short pants trying to throw an orange leather sphere into an orange cylinder twice its diameter. The activity will be carried out by 576 "ballers," all of whom hope they have "game" come Thursday morning.

Cager a cager

The argot is nothing new.

About 117 years ago, when I played high school basketball, we were called "cagers." The word dates back to when a wire cage enclosed the court to protect those on it from those off it and vice versa. Read on to see why that might not be such a bad idea in some venues today.

Plus, listed on my basketball All-Name team is Willie Cager, the smoothie who played for tiny Texas Western when it upset mighty Kentucky in the 1966 NCAA Championships. The subtext of that momentous event was that Texas Western started five black players against an all-white Southern school at a time when civil rights was front-page news.

Adding to the nomenclature this weekend will be the fans. They will be chanting and cheering and even booing in spots. They will employ traditional mantras from the excessively annoying "air ball, air ball" to the mildly clever "you can't do that (clap, clap, clap, clap, clap), you can't do that."

The creative juices will flow, too, as student sections try to outdo their opponents. I checked a three-week thread on a message board that was detailing the best chants at Nebraska high school basketball games. Some were indeed funny, some not and some simply inelegant, cheap or classless.

The wire on chants is getting higher, however, as invariably the clever gives way to the crude. The fans are an integral and often entertaining part of the atmosphere but should never be the focus. The focus should be on the game.

The usual role models are little help. A recent Sports Illustrated article on sportsmanship stunned me. The piece chronicled star players receiving death threats, parents of star players having to hire security guards for road games and a constant, shocking spew of vitriol and profanity coming from the student section aimed at opponents.

New vocabulary

Last week during the girls tournament, I wondered in print what ever happened to the bounce pass. I'm still wondering.

I'm also beginning to mourn the loss of good defensive position, the kind you get with your feet. I know how boring. The game is all about dunks and three balls. To many, talking defense is about as exciting as a mashed potato sandwich on white with a cold oatmeal chaser.

But ask most coaches and officials, and they will tell you that foul trouble comes not from bad refereeing you'll hear otherwise this weekend but rather from poor position. Poor position is all about what goes on inside the sneakers. The result is an epidemic of hand-checking and lots of fouls.

Speaking of good position, I will be courtside (or a reasonable facsimile, including in the rafters Thursday at Lincoln Southeast High School) this weekend, hoping to see bounce passes and good defense, creative, crazy and civil crowds and OK lots of dunks and long, arcing shots, the kind of things that fuel entire new vocabularies.

George Ayoub is senior writer at The Independent.