A hippie girl selling flowers along the road in Oklahoma, 1973

NOT MY ARTICLE!!

The word “hippie” comes from the word “hip,” which means being up-to-date and hip. In the 1950s, "hip" was commonly applied to the Beats (people who rejected standard narrative values), such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who represented and inspired bohemian artist communities in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. These Beat writers and thinkers were idolized by growing numbers of young people in the 1960s, and, in 1965, a counterculture movement began to converge in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. The term "hippie" was soon applied by local journalists to this new subculture, and the word gained national (and soon international) recognition in 1967, largely due to San Francisco Chronicle reporter Herb Caen's frequent use of the term . The term can be descriptive or derogatory and was not initially used by young people to describe themselves.