Can you dig it?

First, a little folk nonhistory. It is told that the word “hip” came from the posture of opium smokers, who would lie sideways to suck dreams into their lungs. This, however, doesn’t account for the mutation from “hep.” Bernard Wolfe has claimed that the first instance of “hip” in print occurred in his 1954 novel “The Late Risers,” but maybe in those prehistoric, pre-Google times he was only asserting squatter’s rights. In 1948, Anatole Broyard’s essay “Portrait of the Hipster” appeared in the Partisan Review, and Neurotica, an advanced-state literary magazine edited out of St. Louis by the hipster known to the cognoscenti as F. Scott Jaylandesman, brought the message to the heartland.

Now, in the tradition of Susan Sontag brooding on the meaning of “camp,” comes John Leland’s espresso-scented volume “Hip: The History,” in which he dances every which way to see where hip leads him. A danger in his enterprise, of course, is that it might lead back into the mossy realm of “hep.” (Are you hip if you worry about what hip is?) Former editor of the hip-knockoff magazine Details, presently a reporter for the good, gray, not-noted-for-hippitude New York Times, Leland has made career choices that do not evoke those mythic smokers in their fetal position. But it’s all right, babe. His meditation is full of anecdote, nostalgia and an approximation of understanding.

On the acknowledgments page, which he calls “Shout Outs,” Leland thanks his agent for, apparently, suggesting that he write the book; thus is answered the question about inner need. Leland also suggests that it be read “with a grudge” even if your name does not appear in the index. Full avowal: I’m mentioned briefly, but for those who are not, no grudge is necessary, since he ingratiates along the way, like Bob Dylan cracking one of his rare smiles.

Leland corrects the folklore, telling us that “hip” derives from the Senegalese Wolof words hepi, to see, or hipi, to open one’s eyes. My Wolof is rusty; perhaps this derivation merely supplements the opium-slouch, nirvana-breathing version. The book tries on a series of definitions of hip, such as the useful “always new but never going anywhere special -- a present tense reclaimed from the demands of past and future” and the less useful, over-caffeinated “ennobling force that covers for ignominy.” Sontag nailed “camp” in an essay; Leland rambles around “hip” in a 406-page tome.

His major example of hipness seems to be Jack Kerouac, who was more of an angry, ambitious, mother-afflicted drunk than a cool operator. Told that Kerouac “lacked the capacity for subordination that makes for success in war or marriage,” the reader may recollect Kerouac’s capacity for subordinating himself to alcohol, Mom and a mother-like wife. True, the James Dean-style public romance continues, with a young Jack stenciled onto sweatshirts, and ignores another instance of this free spirit’s inability to subordinate: his abandonment of his daughter, Jan. (She told me sadly, after I remarked at a posthumous birthday party for her father that I barely knew him while we were both at Columbia and in the Village: “You knew him more than I did.”)

The book gathers likelier recruits from what the critic Harold Rosenberg called “the herd of independent minds,” exploring the bohemian tradition, the Beat movement, jazz, the black subculture, the counterculture, punks, slackers -- just about every stoner available to magpie research. The Internet? Silicon Valley? Jim Jarmusch’s Cleveland? Wired magazine? Well, whatever. As a native of Cleveland, the Paris of northeastern Ohio, I’m partial to someone who seeks grace there and admits, “It’s kind of a drag here, really.” Even hip San Francisco, where I’ve lived for years, can be kind of a drag. Like Walt Whitman, we all contain multitudes and contradictions.

Leland casts his net pretty wide, trolling from Ralph Waldo Emerson to the rapper 50 Cent. Alan Watts also fits in there someplace, along with Emma Goldman. To his overreaching probes (“Hip is an ethos of individualism, but it tends to grow in cliques”), the reader might prefer the anecdotes and illustrations, such as the tale of the Harlem heiress “to a hair-straightening fortune, [who] gave a party where whites were segregated and served chitterlings and bathtub gin, while black guests enjoyed champagne and caviar.” But then the prose strains, describing crime writers as “working their mojo.” (And the reader wants to cry out, “Wow, you’re really hep, man!”) Still, “hip thrives on contradictions”; lively interruptions redeem the excesses.

One of Leland’s promising riffs describes how irony plays into questions of race and ethnic mixing, the cultivation of secret codes (e.g., “bad” means “good”) to deal with taboo, sex and strangeness. He is shrewd about the sexual energies of hip speech. The tradition of the trickster -- Br’er Rabbit; the Yoruban “signifying monkey” -- came out of Africa and suited the needs of the covertly rebellious. The hip black trickster -- such as Miles Davis, Richard Pryor and Dick Gregory; insulting, teasing, conning, free -- is the wily model from whom a white genius like Dylan learned.

Many others tried to learn, thinking drugs were the key, and lost. “Hip: The History” is not an enlistment poster for those who yearn to join the ranks with a sniff or an injection. Leland connects the dots between drugged coolness and big-time death. Terry Southern, he writes, “cut to the chase: ‘About the hippest anyone has gotten so far, I suppose, is to be permanently on the nod.’ ”

Leland sees Jews and blacks as joined (at the hip), in a rambling chapter that says most of what it needs to say in the prefatory words of Lenny Bruce, to the effect that if you live in New York or you’re black, or you’re an Irish apostate, you’re a Jew, unless you’re a drum majorette. In the chapter titled “Where the Ladies At?” he seems to apologize for his misogynist Beat heroes. “Pretty girls make graves,” said Kerouac; William S. Burroughs made himself mythic by shooting his wife in the head. Leland observes that, well, there were also Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Parker and Anita Loos, among those who did not “re-create the hearths of their mothers.” He notices that this is shaky ground and spends some time on the accomplishments of “riot grrrls,” androgynous rockers and the author of “Boys Are Smelly.”

This potpourri provides the pleasures, revelations and foggy understanding that might come from the serial reading of an encyclopedia: mini biographies, histories, diversions, theories, with birth and death dates often noted in parentheses -- as in “Public Enemy Number One ... John Dillinger (1903-1934).” (For mysterious reasons, Leland includes the rumored size of the Dillinger penis -- allegedly preserved in a jar somewhere in the vaults of a museum in Washington -- in a text describing the impregnation of American culture by traditions from West Africa. Hip is everywhere, bro!)

After his extended wrestle, Leland finally observes that now the hipster is so out that he is, at last, in. This is a far cry from the Wolof “to see, to open one’s eyes” -- or maybe a near cry, as near as your neighborhood Starbucks. In the ‘60s, hippies became the people their parents had warned them against. A generation later, “hip” -- like “hippie” -- has become a consumer product, its manifestations of nonconformity charted and sold by advertisers. Allen Ginsberg survived and evolved, caretaker of both the best and the silliest and living long enough to lament his losses. Despite wars, unemployment, global warming and a president’s socio-politico-grammatical fumbles, the consumer class has learned to lie on its side in dens of niceness, ordering cool goods by cellphone from advanced sites. To the first flush of the Beat movement, I contributed an essay entitled “Hip, Cool, Beat -- and Frantic.” The contemporary version might be called “Hip, Cool, Beat -- and Shopping.”

Leland concludes by again evoking the Wolof “to see, to open one’s eyes,” not in disillusion but without illusions. Is there a difference? Are we really born, as Plato, Rousseau and Shelley thought, with perfect knowledge, and does our innocent wisdom fall away because of corruption by the world and our experience?

Or does hip (example: Terry Southern) say to the squares out there: “Hey, man, you’re really sincere! What’s wrong with you?” *