You asked

Dear Hipster,

There IS a word for being into something before it was cool. It’s precoolcious. I know because I am.

— Cherry, La Mesa

The word Stephen in Hillcrest is looking for to describe something that is now cool is “datdun” as in: “Hipsters are cool but datdun.” In creole-speak it means, “That’s already been acknowledged, so what else you got?”

— Patrick

You asked...there is. It’s called a predipref. It describes predictive preferences.

— Lee’s iPhone

All good suggestions from readers responding to the quest for a single word that describes “being into something before it was cool.”

With a name like “Cherry,” I’m inclined to agree with our precoolcious responder, because I’m pretty sure she’s rocking a wolf shirt and some deck Ray-Bans in her Instagram profile selfie. Charles emailed me to suggest “pretrending,” which is pretty good and in the vein of “preliking.” Problem is, Urban Dictionary already has “pretrending” to mean “pretending to like something just because it’s trendy,” which is what n00b hipsters do before they earn advanced degrees in liking things before they are cool and being over current trends. Steven K. suggests “forepredilectitation,” which sounds like how a magician disappears a rabbit. He writes, “‘Predilection’ means to have a partiality or preference for something. So to make this word a verb meaning ‘to manifest a partiality or preference for something’ would be to drop the ‘on’ at the end of the word, and tack on ‘tate’; thus: predilectitate. Then show that we are manifesting this partiality before some point in time, add the prefix ‘fore’; thus the verb ‘forepredilectitate.’ Finally, to arrive at the noun, add the suffix ‘tion.’”

The phrase “predictive preference” could have erupted from some sociology grad student’s thesis. I can see the following innocently pitched into the text somewhere: “modern hipsters showed a predictive preference for depicting their latte art via social media websites such as the Instagram well before the Selfie Craze of 2012.” It may well be an accurate term, but it’s decidedly unpoetic.

Patrick’s “datdun” intrigues me, mostly because I can’t find it anywhere on the internet and I love obscure anything, obvi. To my ears, it sounds more appropriate as a one-word synonym for “I’m over it,” which I didn’t ask for but nonetheless appreciate receiving. Being over things is hipster occupation #2, right after liking those same things before they were cool. Scientists ought to study the instantaneous transition from preliking to datdun in hipster consciousness. It just might solve that pesky “time problem” the physicists are always grouching over.