Hippies

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Wed, Feb 26, 2003 at 03:48:18PM -0500, Baker, John wrote:
>
> It's interesting to see the development traced by Jonathon
>Green, with the term moving from an ironic to an unironic
>meaning.  Once the term came to mean an unkempt young
>nonconformist, though (the OED says that the flower children
>were a sub-group of hippies), pejorative uses were immediate
>and profuse.  The earliest "positive" uses seem to be around
>1967.  Here's a court case, referring to a court proceeding
>in October 1966:

While it's not necessarily easy, or even possible, to determine
exactly when the term began to denote the sort of stereotypical
figure of the 1960s (as opposed to earlier jazz/beatnik types
who may have behaved in certain similar ways), in my opinion
the earliest examples are from 1965, especially in a series of
articles in the San Francisco Examiner that focused on a new
bohemia that was developing in the Haight-Ashbury district--
the first article was illustrated by a picture of a street-sign
showing the intersection of Ashbury and Haight. These people,
who are referred to as hippies throughout the article, seem to
be the same as what we're talking about.

There's no question that there are a multitude of positive and
self-referential uses by 1966 at latest. Here's a nice 1967 example:

"A hippy is somebody who knows what's really happening.
Hippies despise phoniness; they want to be open, honest,
loving and free. They reject the plastic pretense of
20th-century America, preferring to go back to the natural
life, like Adam and Eve. They reject any kinship with the Beat
Generation on the ground that those cats were negative, but
'our thing is positive'."
-- Hunter S. Thompson, in _N.Y. Times Magazine,_ 14 May

Jesse Sheidlower
OED