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Comment by monknomo | Hacker News Reader

So, hipsters and hipster hate has been around for at least 225 years?

For those unaware, "hipster" turns out to be an excellent analogue to "macaroni"... In the 1940s and 50s the term had positive connotations as someone fashionable or in-the-know, but it has since come to be a term of ridicule.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&searc...

See also: "Dandy"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandy

Seems to be a universal/recurring theme for humanity. See also: "The Congo Dandies"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W27PnUuXR_A

Yankee Doodle went to town

Without his shaving razor

Ate so much his pants got tight

And called himself a hipster

Keep your day job.

Don't let that comment

Get you astir

Give a razor

To that hipster

Burma-Shave

Hey aqualung!

Now imagine digital archaeologists coming across your version and writing the equivalent explanatory article for future readers.

Hipsters are no food and probably are also no food in the future. ;-)

I'm fairly certain it can be dated back to the dawn of written language, and presumably extends back to the beginning of human society.

Hell, if there is a verifiable record of a time period in which a significant fraction of the established generation wasn't moaning on about how the next generation was ruining everything, I'd like to know about it.

  HMMPH! AUSTRALOPITHECUS THINK HIM SO
  GOOD WITH ANIMAL PELT. ME SHOW HIM!
  ME IMPRESS CAVE LADY WITH SUCH SMOOTH
  ROCK. THEN HIM NOT THINK HIM SO GOOD 
  AS ME!

> the established generation wasn't moaning on about how the next generation was ruining everything

That's not at all what people mean when they talk about 'hipsters'.

Perhaps not always, but in my experience it largely comes from the same place, and has about as much actual reason behind it.

Hipsters are a subclass of fops, I think.

I hated fops before it was cool.

And yes, according to Wikipedia you are absolutely correct!

    Some of the very many similar alternative terms
    are: "coxcomb",[1] fribble, "popinjay" (meaning
    "parrot"), fashion-monger, and "ninny". "Macaroni"
    was another term, of the 18th century, more
    specifically concerned with fashion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fop

I figured it'd be accurate, given that the subject of the song is a Yankee Doodle dandy.

Or perhaps a sibling to fops, and child of dandy.

I bet there is a letter from Roman times that calls out some hipster analogue.

The idea that current generations are less manly and morally upright than their forefathers is basically the defining trope of Roman literature.

I think that is the the defining trope of the older generation.

Yup, when your founders were fathered by Mars and suckled by a she-wolf, you can only go downhill from there.

Interestingly, in Latin, a she-wolf (lupa) is slang for a prostitute.

For some inexplicable reason I feel that it is much more likely that they were nursed by a prostitute than by a wolf ;-)

I'm sure a quick reading of Aristophanes would turn up some humor against hipsters.

On the note of ancient literature, it's amusing to note that penis jokes have been around for over 2000 years, some things just never get old.

The Romans drew penises on everything, all the time[1]. They're like your friends, when you fall asleep at a house party

[1] http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1113411682/ancient-roma...

I don't know about the Romans, but here's an example from 1627 https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/L0020217.html

The upside-down "O Maners, O Tymes" is almost certainly a reference to "O tempora, o mores," used by Cicero to mourn the wickedness of his age (end of Roman republic).

There is a well known quote from Classical Greece where they are bemoning the youngsters who go around clean shaven :-)

Alcibiades was know for this if you have read your Thucydides

And for roughly the same reason: masculinity enforcement against a group perceived as flouting gender.

That's not the reason people find hipsters annoying, doubly so these days as the lumbersexual look that's all the rage relies on exaggerated masculine stereotypes.

It's a queered version of masculine stereotypes, though, because it's playful and not serious. And it gets attacked for being not really masculine, along the lines of "have you ever cut down a tree or fought a grizzly? Then have a razor."

If you say so.

Personally I am annoyed by hipster culture because it's often pretentious and judgemental of others while living off family money, confuses materialistic fetishizing of certain kinds of brands with genuine authenticity, and fundamentally is an expression of narcissism. I could care less what gender they express.

I dislike it because it's essentially privileged urbanites mocking working class rural people.

> macaronis drank only milk, avoided eating roast beef at all costs, and disdained popular gathering places like bars and coffeehouses

Looks like Macaronis were not hipsters. One cannot separate a hipster from his coffee and brew.

Drinking coffee was one thing, but visiting a coffee-house was perhaps another. The term brings to mind a very different environment even just by adding the context that the coffee-house exists in modern-day Amsterdam; I can't guess what the social milieu of a coffee-house would be in 1700s Britain.

> I can't guess what the social milieu of a coffee-house would be in 1700s Britain.

Quite an interesting topic, actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17...

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