Far Out and Out-of-Sight The 1960s Hippie Counterculture

Far out! Outta sight! Both of these vintage exclamations of the 1960s have roots that go back far beyond the 1960s, to the turn of the century.

Far out was used by Frank Norris in McTeague (1899) to mean extreme and imaginative. Despite this early use, it was not picked up again for several decades. Robert S. Gold writes in A Jazz Lexicon that in the 1940s far out "became integral to bop and cool," but the first written use that I have found is from 1954, when Time magazine used the expression to describe Dave Brubeck in the November 8 issue and again to describe Stefan Wolpe in the November 22 issue; in both examples, far out was used to mean experimental and out-of-the-mainstream. Through the end of the decade, far out as applied to jazz or other artistic expression enjoyed considerable popularity.

At the same time, far out underwent a generalization process, easing out of its jazz-specific meaning and into a more general superlative meaning. It was used by the hipsters and Beats and by those who were trying to exploit the Beatnik image, to mean astonishing or excellent. The hippie use, then, simply followed on the now-familiar jazz-to-Beat-to-hippie slang trail.
Like far out, out-of-sight can point to serious literary roots. As Richard H. Peck of the University of Virginia noted in American Speech (1966, pages 78-79), out-of-sight was Bowery slang for astonishingly excellent in the 1890s, and was used by Stephen Crane at least four times in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (New York: 1893). Visiting a museum, our heroine utters, "Dis is outa sight." She could have been speaking 70 years later.

Lester V. Berrey and Melvin Van Den Bark identified out-of-sight as a slang synonym for five categories-beyond comparison, very superior, excessive, completely, and expensive-in the American Thesaurus of Slang (New York, 1942), but I found little other evidence of the term's use until the early 1960s.

Although out of the world (or out of this world) was from 1925 on the accepted jazz idiomatic phrase for something that was good beyond mortal experience or belief, out-of-sight was not entirely unknown in jazz circles. For example, in the January 5, 1961, issue of Down Beat, there is a pointed reference to the phrase out-of-sight. The June 20, 1963, issue of Down Beat similarly stated "This record is out of sight."

In the mid-1960s, both James Brown and Little Stevie Wonder popularized the term in song lyrics, and it became an ultimate accolade in youth slang. It is an expression that was appropriated by hippies, marginalized, and then forgotten, living on in the works of Stephen Crane.

I guess there's another....
Way out, man!