[Ads-l] Implicit Antedating of "Hip"

[Shapiro, Fred]

Hmm.  I think Jon is on the right track.  It seems that there were two separate "hipped on" idioms, one meaning "enthusiastic" and one meaning "knowledgeable."  And the 1899 and 1900 citations I found must have been in the "enthusiastic" sense and not connected with "hip" in its "knowledgeable" sense, for which Stephen Goranson's 1902 discovery remains the earliest known citation.

Fred Shapiro


________________________________
From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Jonathan Lighter <00001aad181a2549-dmarc-request at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Tuesday, February 3, 2026 10:44 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: Re: Implicit Antedating of "Hip"

But now, IIRC, the earliest "hip" exx. are in white use.

(Syntactically, OED's 1928 "rube hip agent" can hardly be an occurrence of
this term.)

 OED has "hipped on" (from Yale !) from 1895.

JL

On Tue, Feb 3, 2026 at 10:05 AM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Nice finds, Fred. But...
>
> MW has "hipped," 'extremely absorbed or interested.' HDAS has something
> similar. The expression was once fairly common, though MW dates it only to
> 1920. So your cites are considerable antedatings.
>
>  Of course, "hipped" might represent the etymon of "hip" (but not "hep"?)
> via misinterpretation.
>
>  I'd be amazed to find anything related to  jazzy "hip" in a (white-run)
> WV or SC newspaper around 1900, especially without quotation marks.
>
> JL
>
> On Tue, Feb 3, 2026 at 8:12 AM Shapiro, Fred <
> 00001ac016895344-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:
>
>> 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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>
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>


--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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