[Ads-l] Implicit Antedating of "Hip"

[Shapiro, Fred]

These citations are also antedatings of "hipped" (OED, adjective4, 1920).

Fred Shapiro

________________________________
From: Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, February 3, 2026 7:57 AM
To: American Dialect Society <ads-l at listserv.uga.edu>
Subject: Implicit Antedating of "Hip"

Here are two interesting citations I have found:

1899 Huntington (W. Va.) Advertiser 18 Oct. 3/1 (GenealogyBank)
"There was an old fellow named Lipton,
Yacht racing he was hipped on.
    For a wind he did pray,
    So it came one day,
And that was the day he was whipped on."

1900 News and Courier (Charleston, S.C.) 15 Nov. 8/1 (GenealogyBank)
According  to a story which was running about the Tenderloin yesterday the Barnes woman is hipped on hypnotism.

Sometimes the OED will have, as its earliest citation for a term, an "implied" use of the term.  The implied use is not placed in square brackets.  An example is the cultural-anthropology sense of the word "bonding," where the earliest citation is said by the OED to be "implied in" a use of the words "pair bonding."  I believe that the citations above are antedatings of "hip" (OED,  verb5. 1932).  I also suggest that these citations are implicit antedatings of "hip" (OED, adjective, "Aware, well-informed; in the know," 1904); (Stephen Goranson, 1902); (Fred Shapiro, 1903).  To be "hipped on" means "to be made hip."

Fred Shapiro




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