Why are hippies called hippies??
According to lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower, the principal American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, the terms hipster and hippie derive from the word hip, whose origins are unknown. Hip first appeared during the early 20th century, when its meaning was “aware; in the know.” During the jive era of the late 1930s and early 1940s, African-Americans began to use hip to mean “sophisticated; currently fashionable; fully up-to-date”.[23][24] The term hipster was coined by Harry Gibson in 1940, and used by the American Beat generation during the 1940s and 1950s to describe jazz and swing music performers. The word evolved to describe bohemian counterculture. Like the word “hipster”, the word “hippie” is jazz slang from the 1940s”[25] One of the first recorded usages of the word “hippie” was in a radio show of November 13, 1945, in which Stan Kenton called Harry Gibson a hippie (NBC studios, live radio program, the “Jubilee” show at Billy Berg’s jazz club in Hollywood, CA, and recorded
The word, hippy, has its origins in wrestling and describes a style which uses hip throws and other wrestling moves ‘from the hip’. This expression was borrowed, then, and applied to gunfighters in the time of American pioneering. The original “hippies” were wrestlers, then gunfighters and essentially it referred to the deceptively casual looking ‘fast and loose’ way they dealt with people. After a long lull, the usage was taken up to describe a debating style. A hippy orator would be able to express opinions and construct arguments very readily and with apparent ease. Almost without having to think. The style could, actually, be used to express opinions of any political hue but became associated with extreme liberal issues in the debating clubs of middle class American high schools in the post war era and the word evolved a new association. Before ‘hippies’ were called ‘hippies’ they were just people with extreme liberal opinions. The products of the US high-school debating societies
