Hepper

[hep] /hɛp/

adjective, Older Slang.
1.
4 .
/hɛp/
adjective hepper, heppest
1.
(slang) an earlier word for hip4
/hɛp/
noun (informal)
1.
short for hepatitis

“aware, up-to-date,” first recorded 1908 in “Saturday Evening Post,” but said to be underworld slang, of unknown origin. Variously said to have been the name of “a fabulous detective who operated in Cincinnati” [Louis E. Jackson and C.R. Hellyer, “A Vocabulary of Criminal Slang,” 1914] or a saloonkeeper in Chicago who “never quite understood what was going on … (but) thought he did” [“American Speech,” XVI, 154/1]. Taken up by jazz musicians by 1915; hepcat “addict of swing music” is from 1938. With the rise of hip (adj.) by the 1950s, the use of hep ironically became a clue that the speaker was unaware and not up-to-date.

cry of those leading pogroms or attacks on Jews in Europe, 1819 in reference to Jewish explusions by mobs in various German cities in that year (later called the hep-hep riots); perhaps originally the cry of a goatherd, or of a hunter urging on dogs, but popularly said at the time to be acronym of Latin Hierosolyma Est Perdita “Jerusalem is destroyed,” which, as H.E.P., supposedly was emblazoned on the banners of medieval recruiters for the Crusades who drew mobs that subsequently turned on local Jewish populations. That such things happened is true enough, but the story about the supposed acronym sounds like folk etymology.

adjective

Aware; up-to-date; hip, with it •Taken up by jazz musicians to the extent of being identified with them: By running with the older boys I soon began to get hep/ But I’m hep, man; for example, I had my vasectomy already

Related Terms

unhep

[1908+ Underworld; origin unknown; a 1914 source says it is based on the name of ”a fabulous detective who operated in Cincinnati”]
hepatitus