Slang Of The Sixties

How many hippies do you know?

 

You may not know it, but it is very likely that someone in your family or at least someone you know was a "hippie" in the 1960s and if not, it is likely that you have heard of ex-hippies Ben and Jerry, the creators of 'Ben and Jerry's' ice cream and others featured in this BBC news article. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/695976.stm

 

We, as the younger generation, use slang more than most, but how is our slang different to the slang used by Ben and Jerry back in the 1960s? You may have a stereotypical view of the kind of words hippies use by seeing stereotypical hippie characters such as Neil in the TV series 'The Young Ones' or even by watching 'South Park' .

 

The most common hippie slang word we know is 'groovy' which you may know from watching 'Austin Powers'. This word has been around long before the 1960s but peaked massively around the hippie era, as you can see from the graph above. It seems almost that the word barely existed before the 1960s and its usage decreased rapidly between the 1970s and 80s. Since then it has had a slow increase in use as perhaps it could be coming back 'into fashion'. Other words associated with the hippie culture like 'cool' and 'dude' don't have much of an increase in usage in the 1960s compared to any other time period. The usage of the word 'cool' in fact started to decrease around the 1940s-1950s and as the meaning changed to become more positive and used more to praise something rather than describe the outside temperature, its usage began to rise again but not until the 1990s.

 

Some words they used were just synonyms for words we already had, for example, they said 'bread' instead of money, 'The Man' instead of the boss and called the police 'The fuzz'. These words you may recognise, but how about words like 'bogart', 'padiddle' or 'melvin'?

 

http://www.yourdictionary.com/grammar/slang/1960s-slang.html This site contains a list of slang words used in the 1960s, some you may recognise and others you will not. The usage of many of these words is unknown to many and the only way to find out what they really mean is to ask a real hippie yourself.

 

Hayley Dolan