Where did the word “hippie” come from?
On the east coast of the U.S. in Greenwich Village, young counterculture advocates were named hips. At that time, to be hip meant to be “in the know” or “cool”, as opposed to being called a stodgy “square”. Disaffected youth from the suburbs of New York City flocked to Village coffeehouses in their oldest clothes to fit into the counterculture. On 5 September 1965, the first use of the word hippie appeared in print. In an article entitled “A New Haven for Beatniks,” San Francisco journalist Michael Fallon wrote about the Blue Unicorn coffeehouse, using the term hippie to refer to the new generation of beatniks who had moved from North Beach into the Haight. Fallon reportedly came up with the name by condensing Norman Mailer’s use of the word, “hipster” into “hippie”.The name did not catch on in the mass media until almost two years later, after San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen began using the term hippies in his daily columns.
