Word of the Day:
beatnik
What It Means
A person who dresses in a manner that is not socially acceptable and is supposed to reject conventional norms of thought and behavior; nonconformist in dress and behavior.
A person associated with the Beat Generation of the 1950s and 1960s or its style.
Beatnik in Context
“Worrying news from the west upset Soviet authorities even further. Punk rock was already causing trouble in Poland and other east-European countries. Did someone in the administration fear a repetition of Beatlemania, with decent, twist-dancing beatniki being replaced by pogo-dancing, sneering and...”
Did You Know?
Coined by American columnist Herb Caen in 1958. From beat (generation) + -nik (“person who exemplifies or endorses something”). Compare jazznik. The suffix, a cutesy or ironic use of the Russian suffix -ник (-nik), experienced a surge of use in English coinages for nicknames and diminutives after the 1957 Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: beatnik (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “beatnik.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/beatnik. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
