There was a wonderful article about "The Hippie Dictionary: A Cultural Encyclopedia of the 1960s and 1970s" in our newspaper.

The author, John Bassett McCleary, says, "If you fell asleep in 1959 and woke up in 1980, you would not have been able to recognize the world you were in. I can't think of any other period of time that had so many changes." Now, that may be an exaggeration, I don't know....though perhaps our linguists here do. By "changes," he meant lexical changes.

Cleary says that the hippies didn't coin new words so much as to give existing words new meaning. He says the hippie vocabulary comes from the beat generation, jazz and blues music, African-American culture, Eastern religions, and the British musical invasion of the early 60s. John Ayto, editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Slang and Twentieth Century Words, says that this is amazing because most slang arises out of a self-contained culture; however, hippiedom spread so quickly because of the wide range of influences.

Some examples given were:
- 'karma' a Buddhist term
- 'groovy' a 1930s jazz term
- 'hippie' from early 20th century jazz

Others mentioned were 'freaks,' 'heads' (though I hadn't heard of that), 'cool,' 'dig it,'far out,' 'acid rock,' 'bell bottoms,' 'keen,' 'psychodelic,' and 'flower power.'

I just know you can come up with more!

Others mentioned were 'freaks,' 'heads' (though I hadn't heard of that), 'cool,' 'dig it,'far out,' 'acid rock,' 'bell bottoms,' 'keen,' 'psychodelic,' and 'flower power.'

'Head' as in pot-head and acid-head. Counter-culture shops that sell drug paraphenalia (another word whose meaning has changed) are called headshops. My favorite -head construction is term doctors have given the mental cloudiness and depression that often follow being on a heart-lung machine during surgery: pumphead.

You mistyped 'psychedelic', but that was in fact the first spelling. The guy who coined it first wrote 'psychodelic' but later decided that the 'psycho-' part looked too psycho. So he changed it to 'psyche', which has a mellower, Greek connotation. What a difference a letter makes.

My favorite -head construction is term doctors have given the mental cloudiness and depression that often follow being on a heart-lung machine during surgery: pumphead.
Now, does that mean that your background is medical?

Just off the top of my head:

roach
roach clip
doobie
power hitter
a drag (two definitions, neither involving men wearing women's clothing)
narc (as a verb)
bong
a joint (if you couldn't find your bong)
the man
the connection
"It's a bust!" (having nothing to do with breasts)
high
Elbee and O-zee (though I'm not sure they were spelled that way since I frequently heard these terms used in conversation but never saw them written)
tripping
slave/master (a smoking technique - very sexy!)
"Give me a hit."
pins and thumbs (remember the difference?)
munchies and, my favorite,
HTT though I think that last one was a local term.

Used as in "He never takes any drugs except for HTT," it stood for "Here, take this" implying that the person in question would partake of pretty much anything but was generally too cheap to buy his own stuff.

As noted elsewhere, "to bogart" originally meant to waste marijuana by allowing a joint to dangle from your lips Humphrey Bogart sytle thereby letting the precious herb burn away to no one's benefit. Through misuse, this term later evolved into "to be greedy or selfish" with one's illicit smoking materials which is not the point at all.


Along similar lines, there's the story of the hippie who was arrested just as he was about to inhale from his marijuana cigarette. The punchline was "That's what's known as nailing the head on the hit."


Ah, memories... memories...

The Chad Mitchell trio did a hilarious song about this lingo, beginning,

For a long time now I've been aware
That I'm so hip, the rest of the world is square.
I want to tell all you people, and just take my tip,
It doesn't pay to be too hip.

I can't find the lyrics on line, but I may have someone who has a hard copy. Watch this space!

Oh, another word that originated in the hippie era was "grok," meaning "to understand something deeply, to the point of feeling it." It was coined by Robert Heinlein in his 1961 novel, "Stanger in a Strange Land."

It was coined by Robert Heinlein in his 1961 novel, "Stanger in a Strange Land."

Heinlein also coined the word waldo for those robotic arms you see being manipulated by nuclear technicians.

I hadn't heard of 'waldo' before. What a great word!

I wouldn't consider "grok" a hippie word, but it definitely originated in the 60's. Actually, I'm it took Heinlein a long time to write that book, so it probably originated in the early 50's, but it falls under new language in the 60's.

The somewhat linguistic study of the word "grok" in Stranger in a Strange Land is quite interesting. Grok means just about everything, mainly "Understand", but also all sorts of religious connotations.