Okay, we'd be committing perjury if we said we never used the word hipster. In fact, we just wrote about a hipster trap, a hipster dinosaur, and we're pretty sure we're going to write about a hipster like yesterday. It sucks—we can't help it, but we feel so powerless in terms of other word choices. How else are we going to describe the 'Billyburg boy who gets his coffee at Oslo, wears A.P.C., smokes Gitanes, and plays pool at 169? But, to make us feel a little better, it seems our vocab laziness is somewhat vindicated. According to
Chicago
magazine, the first time the term "hipster" appeared was in the Tribune in 1946, in reference to Harry "The Hipster" Gibson, or Harry Raab, a Bronx guy who played the piano and sang Jerry Lewis-style tunes at Harlem speakeasies. The term continued to be used abundantly in the '50s and '70s before dying out and reemerging a couple years ago, proving that even if we might be over-killing it now, it will only come back in, say 40 years. Any suggestions of what to use until then?