Hepster

The scene is unemployed models and European hepsters. My friend is there. When I walk by, people fall silent. I think my friend is smiling.

“With the Beats,” he said, “there is a deliberate severance from the world, a bleak picture of the mundane and a joy in the outlandish that resonates with Generation Xers. The beatniks and today's hepsters share a shoulder-shrug at just about everything, a fashionable ennui.”

Before Brooklyn became the World Historical Hipster Hub, there were the Hepsters of Harlem. And well before there was an Urban Dictionary for every last nuance of non-standard English, the bandleader and amateur linguist Cab Calloway cataloged some of the unique speech of the 1930s and ’40s in his Hepster’s Dictionary.