BY: ASMA NIDAEI BINTI YUSRI (210953)
Slang is a social variety that may be encountered in everyday conversation. Partridge claims that this phenomenon, which stems from young people experimenting with words and renaming objects and acts, can emerge as a brand-new term that is first used in exclusive group talks over regular languages to build group identification and exclude outsiders. Hippies are one of those unique groups that invent or mutilate new phrases to describe an existing term to define their social identity. Because of the chaotic world filled with war, their parents lived in, they tried to not only change the culture in society but also speak differently using their own terms and words. However, despite their free will and optimism, later after 1969, the community dies down as do its linguistics aspects.
Hippie was a movement of young people in the United States that began in the 1960s and rejects the values and norms of standard American culture. It started on college campuses in the United States and quickly moved to other nations including Canada and the United Kingdom. The term "hip" was used in the 1950s to describe Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who were widely thought to be the originators of hippies. Unlike their activist counterparts known as "Yippie" (Youth International Party), hippies were frequently not immediately engaged in politics, even though the movement developed in part in opposition to US involvement in the Vietnam War (1955–75).
Hippies were mostly white, middle-class teenagers and young adults who belonged to the baby-boom generation, the generation born in the decades after World War II. They felt isolated from middle-class society, which they see as being dominated by materialism and repression. As a result, hippies established their own distinct lifestyles and coined their own terminology and slang, establishing a sense of uniqueness.
Summer of Love was one of the biggest phenomena that were held in 1967 where thousands of young people gathered at San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district to join in the hippie adventure. According to Peter Coyote and Art Gerrans, the kids from all over the country flocked the place making the city infrastructure and resources strained, making the supposed to be peaceful and loving counterculture experience turn bad from people simply coming for drugs. This was the time when the hippie era and culture were starting to fade fast.
Although the early movement proved to raise peace and love in society with the culture they presented and the mindset they spread, the chaos caused by an unsanitary, nonpeaceful condition that spreads in the later years of the 1960s, became the downfall of the baby boomer generations along with the hippie movement. However, through this era, there are some cultures, fashions, and, in the linguistic factor, words, and phrases, that are so ingrained in American English and cultures, it is used continuously to this day, such as the use of the word "cool" to say something is good, and even that already exist in language a decade early. The slang superlatives during this era became worn through overexposure and almost none of the hippies' positive terms survive the era (Gross, 2017).
An interesting aspect of hippie language is how some slangs that were used to describe another word, have the opposite meaning from the original words. For example, in the sentence “She knew the dress she wore was bad, that’s why she walked with confidence in them,” the use of the word “bad” in the hippie era actually meant awesome or good. This is because the '60s was a time of political controversy, rebellion, protest marches, and flower power. From the dust of the '60s turmoil rose a new cultural lifestyle and languages with a new breed of people. This shows us how these people of the '60s are rebelling against the norm of controversial life at that time in the most unique way which is through using irony in the words they used.
Furthermore, it is intriguing to see the issue of how hippies are seen as having the ability to “check out” of society and live in a world that they want, while at the same time participating in the civil rights movement happening around the same era, where the African Americans are fighting for their rights to get their place in the society. This was critiqued by a lot of people thinking the hippies are incongruent in their actions. This was critiqued by a lot of people thinking the hippies are incongruent in their actions.
In my opinion, although there are darker sides to the hippie lifestyle in the 1960s that made people disassociate themselves from anything related to the countercultural movement, the slangs used during that era are very fascinating due to appealing imagery and pleasantly antiquated phrasing that communicates about every mood. Therefore, hippie slang should be brought back to use today simply to spice up a daily conversation and get our point across with style. No matter how odd the hippie slang in the 1960s or any other slang may be, all slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry- Gilbert K Chesterton.
In conclusion, although there are eras or cultures that have passed, their influence on the community and society would always remain even in the slightest. The use of slang in the 1960s shows how creative people can be to make conversations and language in general, more fun, and exciting. Since slang words are often used to create and define a certain group's social identity, we can understand how it is quite short-lived and will fade once that group dissipates. Hippie slang is a good example that shows how social variation evolves in language. From this study, we get to know a little deeper why hippie slang exists and how some of their terms become used in everyday communication.
Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia (2021, July 30). hippie. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/hippie
Gross, T. (2017). 50 years after the summer of love, hippie counterculture is relegated to kitsch. NPR.org. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/555139348
Ben T. Smith. (2011, July 12). Far out: The hippie dialect. Dialect Blog. http://dialectblog.com/2011/07/12/hippie-dialect/
AmericanExperiencePBS. (2017). Chapter 1 | summer of love | american experience | PBS. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2ZExRNT0GU