This meaning of hip is thought to have originated with African Americans during the Jive Era of the 1930s and '40s. In the 1950s, “hip” was commonly applied to the Beats, such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who represented and inspired the bohemian artist communities in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City.
These Beat writers and thinkers were idolized by a growing number of youths in the 1960s, and by 1965 a burgeoning counterculture movement began to converge in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district.
The term hippie was soon applied by local journalists to this new subculture, and the word gained national (and soon international) recognition in 1967 thanks in large part to the frequent use of the epithet by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. The term can be descriptive or derogatory and was not initially used by the youths to describe themselves.
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