Maura Magazine | What Is The Hipster?

What Is The Hipster?

Over the past five years, few words have been as stretched and contorted by their derisive usage as “hipster”—is it a way to identify people with taste, or more money than taste, or more time than money, or really weird glasses, or amorphous globs of trend-story subjects? It’s unclear, but it is definitely maddening.

I started writing a piece on how the word “hipster” was misused and overused and should probably be retired for good, but while compiling my supporting research I was just flabbergasted at how elastic the term has become—it’s saggier than the waistband on a pair of vintage jogging pants. Here are a few Google News-derived definitions of “hipster,” which will probably go to show you how degraded the skills of line editing and copyediting have become in this similarly debased age:

Sen. [...]