Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Hippie Origins

So, I was reading Soiled Doves: Prostitution in the Early West by Anne Seagraves, and she mentioned that when one would go to an opium den to smoke, since, in most dens, there was a lack of furniture, one would have to smoke their opium leaning on one hip... like so:
Seagraves mentions that this is perhaps where the word "hippies" came from.. but.... after some thought and some wiki searching, Hippies come from the 70's. They were followers of the jazzy Hipster movement in the 1940's.. so i went looking for the origins of Hipster instead. After a little more wikipedia surfing, which is not the most truthful place ever, I found two theories:

1. Etymologically, the words hep and hip may have been derived from hepi, a word in the West African language Wolof that means “to see” or hipi that means "to open one's eyes".

2. "Hipster" derives from the slang "hip" or "hep," which are derived from the earlier slang "hop" for opium.

and apparently hipsters were originally called hepcats... (how forties...) I don't really know if Hipsters smoked opium since there weren't many opium dens left in the 1940's.. but if they did.. i guess it would make a lot of sence.. anyways.. I'm curious what the true origins are.

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