Lily in Madison, Wisconsin, wonders about the use of the words vibe and vibing to mean “having a good time” with someone else. The sense of vibrations reflecting some kind of mystical connection goes centuries back and was famously celebrated in the Beach Boys’ 1966 hit, “Good Vibrations.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Origins of Vibe and Vibing”
Hi there, you have A Way with Words.
Hi there, my name is Lily and I’m from Madison, Wisconsin.
Hey Lily, welcome.
Hi Lily, what’s up?
Hi, so I had a question about the word vibe.
I’m a teenager who goes to high school and I hear people use the word all the time. Just to mean, you know, having a fun time doing something.
And I heard my co-worker talking with me the other day about how vibe used to be a word for having feelings for people. I was just wondering how the word has changed over time and like what it originated from.
So describe in more detail how you use it today. What kind of what kind of situations would it come up in?
It’s more of a slang word now. So, you know, when people just talk about, you know, it’s more of a party situation, I think. So if you’re with a group of people and you just say I’m vibing, it means you’re having a good time.
So I think it’s like casual.
Yeah, that sounds about right. That’s definitely one of the uses of the slangy uses of vibe.
But let’s go back more than 100 years and actually even further back than that. The vibrations, actual vibrations like things moving rapidly in a repetitive way, have long been seen as having a connection to spirituality, the universe, the body and the mind. Even back to ancient times.
And so people have, in a kind of metaphysical or semi-spiritual way, thought about vibrations as a thing that they could perceive or control. Vibrations have been out there as a thing, including vibrations from the stars, the cosmos, the planets, and so forth.
And then we get to vibrations being used in the way that we kind of use it today. By the end of the 1800s, Oscar Wilde wrote in The Importance of Being Earnest about the name Jack, J-A-C-K, producing absolutely no vibrations, meaning that the name didn’t really do anything for him. And so that’s kind of what we’re talking about today, right? Vibrations are about something or someone or a situation working for you. If you’re vibing at a party, that means this party is really working for you. You’re feeling good and everything’s pleasant or mellow.
And so in the century after Oscar Wilde used in that way, vibrations continued to be used in a way that popped up in horoscopes and other works of astrology. And it rose to new popularity in the hippie movements of the 1960s, which cherry-picked from even more religious uses and philosophies and sciences and even more cosmology.
And then in 1966, the Beach Boys released their hit Good Vibrations, which was a huge hit. And the reason I said it and then, vibrations were already a thing and the hippies were already talking about it. But for the non-hippies and the people not in the know, for the squares, this kind of brought the idea of vibrations out of the hippie movement, out of the counterculture world to the squares and the people who weren’t a part of the movement.
And so by 1967, emotional vibrations had been shortened to vibes, although vibes had already been in use since the 1940s as an abbreviation for the musical vibraphone, which is kind of like a xylophone.
Anyway, so the verb meaning to produce vibrations or to feel vibrations appeared at about the same time. And by the 1970s, to feel good or to be in the zone or to feel like something special happening, which is more or less how we use it today, was established.
And so you can say to someone, we’re really vibing together in the 2000s, and everyone knows what you mean.
That’s a great answer. Thank you so much.
I poured it all out of my head.
And, Lily, I want to thank you for that earworm. Now I have the Beach Boys in my head.
Yes.
Yeah, it was my fault. Sorry.
Are you old enough to have listened to the Beach Boys, or is that familiar to you at all?
Yeah, my parents absolutely love the Beach Boys, so I’ve heard them a couple times.
Yeah, check out their song, Good Vibrations, if you don’t know it already. If you would love an earworm.
How weird is it to know that you’re using a slangy—you’re in high school, and using the slangy word that is derived from people more than 100 years ago thinking about their connection to the planets and the vibrations that they might be sensing from, say, the Jupiter. You know, it’s kind of ironic. I feel like when kids use it these days, they’re almost talking about it in a psychedelic form. So it kind of makes sense. The connection is there. There’s still a little bit of the sense of the hippiness of it, kind of this vague spirituality with no precise definition.
Right, exactly. Well, cool. Lily, you sound like a smart kid and I’m glad you called us and I want you to call us again.
All right.
All right.
Thank you so much.
All right.
Good luck.
Be well.
You too.
Bye-bye.
All right.
Bye-bye.
