- beat
- 1) na member of the 'beat generation' or aspirer to its values. The term, coined by the influential American writer Jack Ker-ouac and first published by John Clellon Holmes in his novel Go, is derived both from the notion of being beaten, down-trodden or poor, and from the notion of beatitude or holiness. The phrase 'the beat generation', coined in imitation of other literary groups such as the Lost Generation of the 1920s, originally applied to a relatively small group of writ-ers, artists and bohemians in America immediately after World War II, whose activities and beliefs were minutely chronicled in autobiographical, mystical and experimental prose and poetry by Kerouac, Holmes, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, among others. The term beatniks (employing the Slavonic '-nik' suffix disparagingly) was applied to these and later followers by members of straight society, hostile to what they saw as the licentious, irreli-gious and communistic aspects of the beat lifestyle. In Britain the beats were a youth subculture of the early- to mid-1960s, which co-existed with the mods and rockers and metamorphosed into the hippies.► 'The most beautifully executed, the clearest and most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac him-self named years ago as "beat", and whose principal avatar he is.' (Gilbert Millstein, New York Times, 5 September 1957)2) adjAmericanexcellent, admirable, fashionable. A syn-onym for cool, in vogue since 2000 and used by pop singer Britney Spears among others.
Contemporary slang . 2014.
