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Comment by narag | Hacker News Reader

Hipster is a puzzling word for this non-native English reader. Dictionaries say that it's people with unconventional and modern tastes in music, clothes... I had detected an unexplained negative tone whenever I see it used. Now this article seems to suggest that there's also an economic factor. That would explain it. So instead of "modernos" I guess I should translate it as "pijos".

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"Hipster" is basically just an insult. There is no group of people who calls themselves "hipsters", and in fact nobody agrees on who exactly the hipsters are. A tattooed bike messenger might insult a heavily bearded, Carhartts-wearing beer brewer for being a hipster, who might in turn mock the girl with the heavy glasses and the polka-dotted dress who works as a barista and spends her weekends digging through thrift shops for being a hipster, and she might then laugh at the couple down the street with the Subaru and the chicken coop in their back yard for being hipsters, and they might groan when they see the bike messenger and his friends at their local bar and complain about how all the hipsters have taken over. None of these people would think of themselves as hipsters, but someone two states away might refer to them all as hipsters when making fun of the neighborhood they all live in.

I actually got accused of being a hipster for no other reason than I use Linux exclusively - from an Apple fanboi.

Pot meet kettle. That's the definition of irony right there since in my experience, most hipsters tend to use Macbooks and are fanatic about iPhones. Naturally, they have copious complaints about both.

The pejorative implication is that it applies to someone whose tastes/fashions are outside the mainstream merely for the sake of being outside the mainstream.

There's a further implication that those tastes are just as much a result of groupthink as the mainstream tastes.

This is the only comment so far that gets at the actual pejorative connotation. That's also why particular sartorial and recreational commonalities are picked on. Seeing a guy on a fixed-gear bicycle in skinny girl-jeans, a v-neck tee, and an ironic mustache produces the same sort of feeling you might get if you saw somebody dressed as a newsboy from the 1920s. It's a costume, in other words.

Hipster is an older word that has been co-opted more recently to describe a contemporary subculture, so it's not surprising that dictionaries have it wrong. Also, the subculture itself is a little bit difficult to pin down because many of its members (as judged by outside observers) wouldn't identify as hipsters, necessarily. More can be found at Wikipedia, although the page is of mixed quality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_%28contemporary_subcult...

hipster is a subculture which has been around maybe ten years. It's fairly amorphous, and any dictionary which mentions it is almost certainly not quite correct.

I'd reckon that the key characteristics of hipster are some fuzzy idea of "authenticity", as well as a certain styling of preferred art. This often manifests itself in preferring bands that are just getting started and various curios that reflect a more primitive time. Unsophisticated bikes and a preference for 'irony' are also hallmarks of the idea.

Your mileage will vary.

Add to that "gafapastas".

Gafapasta is probably the best choice I'm aware of. Pijo doesn't carry art-geek creds or suggest youth.

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