Benito Mussolini

Dear Hipster:

Is it ever the case that somebody might want to impersonate a hipster? If so, why?

— Darren

One might think, given the general opprobrium towards hipsterkind on behalf of the general public, nobody in his or her right mind would knowingly impersonate a hipster. Yet, perhaps because the whole world secretly envies hipster coolness; or perhaps for the same, inexplicable reason people keep eating at the Cheesecake Factory despite a laundry-list of compelling reasons to eat virtually anything else, improper invocations of the “hipster” name do indeed crop up from time to time.

You usually see this as the result of a certain clueless innocence displayed by people trying to name a blog, Tumblr, or Instagram feed: The Hipster [] or @The[]Hipster. It’s cute, but it doesn’t work any better than if I tried to rename this column “Ask a Billionaire Who Owns a Ferrari and Definitely Didn’t Ever Sincerely Declare a Popular Nickelback Song ‘The Song of the Summer’ When it Was Receiving Heavy Radio Play.”

To be clear, I don’t mean the kind of malahipsterisms where somebody calls something “hipster” when it isn’t particularly hipster. For example, news columnists have labelled the nascent, Italian political movement to destigmatize Benito Mussolini as “hipster fascism.” This is objectively terrifying because the only thing more insufferable than an ordinary hipster would be a jackbooted hipster fascist ranting about how all the immigrants need to go back to the countries where his fair trade coffee grows before the price of single-origin Guatemala goes through the roof on account of a farm labor shortage at 2200m above sea level. It is not, however, a hipster impersonation.

Dear Hipster:

Why do people hate the word “moist”? Although I doubt this is a particularly hipster thing, it remains an inquiry to which I’ve never heard a satisfactory answer despite asking many people over the years.

— Denise

There’s probably a science answer out there. You won’t get it here. I don’t science all that well. Heck, if the Reader’s inbox is any indication, I don’t even hipster well enough to earn my meal ticket half the time. But enough of that! On to substance.

I sincerely suspect the vast majority of people who like to say, “Oh, I can’t stand that word,” are only saying it because they heard somebody else say the exact same thing at one time or another. So many things have to start like that. There was probably a time when some broke fool had nothing but bread and avocados in his kitchen, and he thought, “Might as well spread these green boys on some toast.” Next thing you know, L.A. hipsters are moving to San Diego so they can open up avocado toast boutiques. And isn’t there something almost infuriatingly hipster about piling on to a word that never did anything to anybody? I mean, sure, maybe there’s a few people out there who had traumatic childhood experiences biting into a nice, moist, chocolatey cake from the local Costco and finding a severed human finger inside. For those few people, maybe the word “moist” evokes some heinous memories. The rest of ‘em have FOMO over a cool, hipster word aversion.

—DJ Stevens