December 08, 2013 5:29 PM
Aside from racial and ethnic slurs, there aren't many words that prompt a more immediate and visceral response than "hipster." Many associate the term with craft beer, smugness and, of course, Brooklyn. Modern-day hipsters have inspired a huge number of Tumblrs, memes and trend pieces in the media.
It may seem like hipsters sprang up out of nowhere sometime in the late 1990s, but the original hipsters were around several generations before that. And they were strongly associated with another uniquely American phenomenon — jazz.
The word "hip," signifying cool or trendy, has been part of American English since the early 1900s, but its exact origins are unknown. What we do know is that the word became widely used in the '30s and '40s. As jazz became more popular, young white people began to travel to African-American clubs and neighborhoods, especially Harlem, to embrace black music and dance.
In 1939, the jazz singer Cab Calloway published Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary: Language of Jive. A hep cat was "a guy who knows all the answers, understands jive." The hep cats and hepsters Calloway described would in the following years become known as hipsters.
Two years later, the African-American pianist and journalist Dan Burley released his Original Handbook of Harlem Jive. Burley, a journalist for Harlem's Amsterdam News, authored a newspaper column called "Back Door Stuff," which documented the jazz scene in Harlem in the '40s and the "jive" spoken by the hep cats and hipsters.
Read more: http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/12/06/249275784/dont-you-dare-call-me-a-hipster-i-sir-am-a-hep-cat?ft=1&f=1003
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