Amglish In, Like, Ten Easy Lessons_ A Celebration of the New World Lingo - Arthur E. Rowse [23]
The main themes soon went international, with colonies arising in Mexico, Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Britain, and Germany, among other places.
NEW MUSICAL THEMES
Music was the main vehicle of the movement, with lyrics almost always pointing toward a new informality of language and indifference to societal norms. This was particularly evident at the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock. Among the major stars were Bob Dylan and the Beatles, who helped spread the gospel of the psychedelic mindset in the BBC-banned album’s closing song, “A Day in the Life,” from their game-changing Sgt. Pepper album.
John Lennon struck a similar theme with his dreamy vocal, “I’d love to turn you on,” a notion inspired by Timothy Leary’s slogan, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” The Beatles did much the same with songs that stretched the limits of what a pop record could be, with shades of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Lewis Carroll, and the folkie-turned-rocker Dylan.
Dylan took a different path to the same place, following folk and blues idioms to craft his own catalog of songs that referenced everyone from Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot to Bette Davis. His “Maggie’s Farm” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival was one of his final protest songs and was directed at the folk protest movement itself.
With their themes of protest, noncompliance, and love, these artists also were helping to shape a new American lingo, one that was free from the constraints and tensions of old-fashioned English.
CODIFYING THE PATTER
Out of all this came a 688-page Hippie Dictionary by John Bassett McCleary, a former hippie himself.15 “Within recent history,” he writes in the book, “no other counterculture has had as much effect on our lives and our vocabulary as has the hippie culture. . . . One must admit that the 1960s and ’70s greatly influenced what exists today.”
Adam Wojtanek, a blogger who calls himself “The Polish Hippie,” goes further. He credits hippies and the Beatles not only for their broad cultural impact but for their powerful effect on American politics, resulting in ending the Vietnam War, granting amnesty to draft evaders, and helping to push gay rights, women’s rights, and ecology out of the shadows.
Today’s relaxed linguistic atmosphere was shaped to a great extent by hippie themes. Among popular words and phrases coined then and still in wide use are hang in there, heavy, chill, cool, cop out, and head case. The one word that seems to embody the whole story is cool, which not only survives but still flourishes today. A certain degree of cool seems to come from merely repeating the word as much as possible.
HERITAGE WORDS FROM HIPPIEDOM
It was really a gas to meet this far out dude. We scarfed down a pizza and beer, then hung loose until I got tired and split the scene. I came back to your pad so I could crash on your sofa. Do you dig it?
The world of computer nerds has also contributed new words to the nation’s vocabulary, including char for character, url for a Web address, prolly for probably, spam for unwanted e-mail messages, and asl for age, sex, and location.
THE KEY ROLE OF BLACKS
No population group has contributed more to today’s informal language than African-Americans. Whether in musical lyrics or street lingo, they have been at or near the cutting edge of almost all language changes since the early twentieth century. From early slave talk to spirituals, Dixieland, swing, rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and finally hip-hop, African-Americans have set the pace in pop music and pop talk to this day.
To a great degree, jazz and its lyrics sparked the trend. It all started in earnest in the 1930s and 1940s with the public’s infatuation with the groovy jazz of Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington. For many people, that love affair has continued right through to the present day.
Among the first words that joined the popular lexicon from the jazz world were baby