street, attrib./adj.

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On the alt.usage.english newsgroup, contributor Mickwick posted this query:

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http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.usage.english/msg/072fee00f74fd336

Ben, would it be possible for you to look up the hip adjective 'street',
the one meaning demotic or vernacular or (non-pejorative) vulgar or
'what real people are doing and saying right now without any help from
the Man' or thereabouts? (It's very hard to define without using
'street' in the definition.) I'm half-hoping that I've found an
antedating instance.

It's unlikely, though. Since I first came across it I've realised that
it's probably a different 'street', one connected with hobos rather than
urban hipsters - not life on the street but life on the road.

But I might as well post it. Whatever its meaning, it's pleasantly
oxymoronic.

It's in a transcript of a 1963 radio interview with Bob Dylan (in the
latest _Granta_). Studs Terkel is trying to get Dylan to explain why he
affects such a folksy mode of speech.

Terkel: Some will say: listen to Bob Dylan, he's talking street mountain
        talk now, though he's a literate man, see.

(Dylan says he 'got no answer' but he doesn't mind if people think he's
literate.)
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OED2 def. 4e has the more urban sense (e.g., "street culture") from 1967.
Can anyone antedate attributive/adjectival "street" in either the hip
urban sense or Terkel's apparently hobo-related sense?


--Ben Zimmer