[Ads-l] mindblown

[Ben Zimmer]

My latest Wall Street Journal column is on the "mind=blown" meme,
which has encouraged people to treat "mindblown" as a single word.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/mind-blown-has-its-roots-in-the-hippie-1960s-1472829271

If paywalled, you can Google the headline: http://goo.gl/JZmkGM

OED3 (March 2002 revision) has an entry for "mind-blown" meaning
"amazed, astounded, mentally overwhelmed; mentally exhausted (esp. as
a result of drug use)," with a first cite from May 1968. Here it is
from March 1967:

-----
Time Magazine, 17 Mar 1967, "Love on Haight"
The Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco is not so much a
neighborhood as a state of mindlessness. The Erewhon of America's "pot
left," a 10-by-15 block midtown section, has over the past year become
the center of a new utopianism, compounded of drugs and dreams, free
love and LSD. It is a far cry from the original Utopia, envisioned
some 400 years ago by Sir Thomas More, whose denizens demanded six
hours of work each day: the 7,000 mind-blown residents of San
Francisco's "Psychedelphia" demand a zero-hour day and free freak-outs
for all.
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,836798,00.html
-----

The entry for "blow" hasn't been revised yet, so the early citations I
gave for "blow one's mind" back in '04 still haven't been
incorporated.

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2004-December/043902.html

--bgz

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