Letter to the Mercury

This is a letter I just wrote to the Portland Mercury in response to an article about the word "hipster" found at: http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/Content?oid=339392&category=34029

The letter is too cerebral and lacking in profanity to be published, so I'm publishing it here.

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Chas Bowie’s article granting amnesty to the most overly used term in the Portland vocabulary—hipster—was long overdue. Bowie’s observation that “people are playing fast and loose with the term” could not be more astute. As a linguistics junkie and bearer of an English degree (read: barista), I appreciate the facility of our language to turn nouns into adjectives. But Portlanders are putting too great a burden on the overworked adjective “hipster;” which can now be used to modify, as Bowie points out, a bar, an intersection in North Portland, a cheap beer brand, a burrito joint or anywhere that one might walk in an hear Dolly Parton being played (ironically, of course) on vinyl.

Bowie posits a definition that lends a concrete image to a term that has been beaten into ambiguity: “By and large, the term ‘hipster’ is used to point to somebody who enjoys art, good films, and music that you won’t hear on most Clear Channel stations.” Bowie succeeds in painting an authentic portrait of the Portland hipster sans pejorative undertones. However, I believe that a straw man is being set up when this hipster is pitted against the frat boy or the rich man. These stereotypes, offensive as they may be, are not truly in competition with the Portland hipster. (Is the Mercury even distributed in Beaver-tron?)

The true dichotomy, as I have perceived it, exists between the hipster and the hipster-curious squares of Portland’s social fabric. This hostility towards hipster-ness stems from a combination of jealousy and self-consciousness; jealous slingers of the term can find no better way to cope with their own failure to acquire culture, while the self-conscious eschew a self-application of a term that suggests they are striving to be something, but might fail at it.

I would argue that, in addition to Bowie’s, a supplemental definition is necessary to describe the evolution of the word “hipster” from a type of person to the idea it represents, which might read: “Hipster (adj.) - a word used to describe the act of striving towards artistic self-expression and the backlash that this act incites.” Because this definition lends a perhaps too noble cause to hipsters, I should clarify, as Bowie does, that some people out are just assholes who deserve no defense. Cause come on man, it’s cool to be nice.