Good For Something

While The New York Times falls short in many places, it does a wonderful job on a few things. As a nerd, I believe they are perhaps the best at explaining their own grammatical and syntactical errors, of which are many. If you have any interest in the English language, "After Deadline" is solid and, at times, quite hilarious.

The column is written by Phillip B. Corbett, who I believe holds the title "Standards Editor," a very impressive title at the paper. He gathers reader and staff feedback and makes the call on what was OK and what wasn't.

In last week's installment, Corbett calculated the use of the word "hipster," a term he's seen litter the paper. He did some quick calculations and research, which I wanted to pass along because most of you are just about finished reading this:

We try hard to shed our old image as stodgy and out of it. Perhaps too hard, sometimes.

How else to explain our constant invocation of the old/new slang “hipster”? As a colleague pointed out, we’ve used it more than 250 times in the past year.

The word is not new, of course. The O.E.D. dates it to the 1940s and helpfully equates it with “hepcat.” American Heritage offers this quaint definition: One who is exceptionally aware of or interested in the latest trends and tastes, especially a devotee of modern jazz.

Our latest infatuation with “hipster” seems to go back several years, perhaps coinciding in part with the flourishing of more colloquial (and hipper) blogs on our Web site. In 1990 we used the word just 19 times. That number rose gradually to about 100 by 2000, then exploded to 250 or so uses a year from 2005 on.