"Hip" from Wolof?; Big Apple Whores (cont.); My book is published

[Laurence Horn]

At 7:47 AM -0400 10/17/04, Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
>"HIP" FROM WOLOF?
>
>Hip: The History
>By John Leland
>Ecco, 405 pp., %26.95
>
>http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/182/sante.shtml
>EYES WIDE SHUT
>BY LUC SANTE
>The way of all hip, from Emerson to a billboard near you
>
>John Leland may or may not have written the first history of hipness-I can't,
>in an admittedly casual search, find another-but it's hard to shake the
>thought that such a book might as well be its subject's obituary. It's like
>broadcasting the rituals of the lodge, or maybe spelling down all
>the names of the
>godhead. There are dozens of histories of bohemia, but that's not the same
>thing, although the two concepts have a large field of intersection. Bohemia
>started in Europe and spread around the world, but hip (Leland
>employs the word as
>both adjective and noun) is indigenously American. The word derives from the
>Wolof hepi ("to see") and hipi ("to open one's eyes"). The idea of hip emerged
>from seeds sown in Senegambia that budded in America. It has everything to do
>with race mixing, and it works both ways, comprising not just white people's
>love and theft of black style but also African American appropriations of
>European baggage: the pianoforte, the three-button suit,
>existentialism, Yiddish
>expressions, horn-rim glasses, the novel. And hip is occult, arcana without a
>heaven.
>
>
>I saw this book at the Barnes & Noble and I've been thinking about this.
>Lighter's HDAS has "origin unknown" for "hep" and "hip." It's nice that a book
>about the subject, such as this is, can go beyond scholarship and state a
>conclusion for a mass audience that's not based on evidence.
>
>And the reviewers--they usually know even less.
>
>I don;t subscribe to the "Wolof" theory at all. Even if I did, however, I
>would have reservations in stating this before the general public. But I guess
>that wouldn't be hip.
>

Barry and others will be unsurprised to learn that in today's NYT (p.
E18), reviewer Ben McGrath also cites Leland's Wolof etymology of
"hip" without disclaimer.  So now it's official.

Larry