The most interesting claims about word origin are often wrong. Jesse Sheidlower, editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary seems to have the goods on one, in Slate:
John Leland kicks off his entertaining new book, Hip: The History, with a seductive little linguistic anecdote. The word hip, he says, derives from the West African language Wolof, and was “cultivated by slaves” from West Africa. Leland goes on to use the etymology of the word as a framing device for part of his argument: Hip — the word and the concept — “was one of the tools Africans developed to negotiate an alien landscape, and one of the legacies they contributed to it.” Sounds fascinating, right?
There’s just one problem: The etymology is wrong. . . .
A particular telling quote: While Leland consulted various sources (which turned out to all flow from the same wrong initial source, or so says Sheidlower), “Leland also wrote to me, ‘Of all the proposed etymologies I saw, the case for slave origins struck me as the strongest, earliest and most edifying.'” Whether a linguistic claim is repeated often turns largely on whether it is “edifying” or amusing or otherwise gratifying, and not enough on whether it’s accurate.
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