Yippie

A "yippie" is a member of the Youth International Party. The name was a take-off on "hippie" and was applied to New York figures such as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.

"Yippie" was coined by Paul Krassner in his New York-based publication, The Realist, in 1967. Krassner later wrote, in the Los Angeles (CA) Times in 2007, that "yippie" was coined on December 31, 1967, in a Lower East Side apartment. "Yippie" is mainly of historical interest today.

[This entry was prepared with the research assistance of the Quote Investigator.]


(Oxford English Dictionary)
yippie, Yippie
orig. U.S.
[f. the initials of Youth International Party + -IE, influenced by HIPPIE, HIPPY n. and a.]
A member of a group of politically active hippies, orig. in the United States.
1968 Time 5 Apr. 55/1 The Yippies 1968's version of the hippies... The term Yippie comes from Youth International Party.

Wikipedia: Youth International Party
The Youth International Party (whose adherents were known as Yippies, a variant on "Hippies" which is also used today to designate the surviving circle of activists who came out of the now-defunct YIP) was a highly theatrical political party established in the United States in 1967. An offshoot of the free speech and anti-war movements of the 1960s, Yippies presented a youth-oriented countercultural alternative to the strait-laced earnestness often associated with representatives of those movements. They employed media-savvy gestures—such as advancing a pig ("Pigasus the Immortal") as candidate for President in 1968—to mock the social status quo.

The Yippies had no formal membership or hierarchy: Abbie Hoffman, Anita Hoffman, and Paul Krassner were among the founders of the Yippies (according to his own account, Krassner coined the name). Other activists associated with the Yippies include Jerry Rubin, Stewart Albert, Dick Gregory, Ed Sanders, Phil Ochs, and David Peel.

Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin became the most famous Yippies—and bestselling authors—in part due to publicity surrounding the five-month Chicago Seven Conspiracy trial of 1969.
(...)
A YIP-related newspaper, The Yipster Times was founded by Dana Beal in 1972 and published in New York City. It changed its name to Overthrow in 1979.

Yippies in the new millennium
The Yippies led by Beal, with their headquarters at 9 Bleecker Street in lower Manhattan, have continued as a small movement into the early 2000s. They no longer publish a newspaper but are known for their annual marches in New York City to legalize marijuana.

The Realist
Google Books
August 1967, The Realist, article written by Paul Krassner, pg. 21, col. 2:
Coincidental with the Democrats' Convention there's going to be a Youth International Party -- YIP -- and Chicago will be invaded by a mass of yippies.

You've just witnessed the birth of a word.
(NOTE: This issue was published later than August 1967. "We're a little late, folks … This is the August 1967 issue being published in January '68 of the Realist." -- ed.)

Los Angeles (CA) Times
'60s live again, minus the LSD
The neodoc `Chicago 10' resurrects a turbulent era and gets a thumb's-up from an original Yippie.

January 28, 2007|Paul Krassner | Special to The Times
(...)
On the afternoon of Dec. 31 (1967 -- ed.), several activist friends gathered at the Hoffmans' Lower East Side apartment, smoking Colombian marijuana and planning for Chicago. Our fantasy was to counter the convention of death with a festival of life.

We needed a name to signify the radicalization of hippies, and I came up with Yippie as a label for a phenomenon that already existed, an organic coalition of psychedelic hippies and political activists.