You are close enough in your analysis but let me expand on why I find the term Hipster offensive and stupid, both generally and specifically.

I know three households in my neighborhood that keep chickens. One house has both chickens and goats, they grow a wide variety of vegetables and fruits. The people who own the house are in their late thirties or early forties. They have something of a "hippie" aesthetic in their dress. I find them somewhat creepy, they aggressively accused me of calling the police about a possibly illegally parked RV outside their house, which I did not do. The RV in question was about a half block from my house, it wasn't in my way and it was a pretty cool looking older model vehicle that I thought was cool.

One block from my house are a couple that I presume to be professionals by their dress and hours. They are in their late thirties, a tad overweight, keep several raised beds of vegetables and assorted herbs and greens. Nice folks, they talk to my kid about their chickens. I can't imagine anyone picking them out of a crowd as different from anyone else.

The third house once again has a garden which I can't tell you much about as it's raised up and behind a fence. I don't know much about the people who live there except that at least one gentleman who lives there appears to be in skilled trades or construction. He has a workmanlike truck and his dress is that of a man who does some kind of physical labor. I'd say he is in his early thirties. They have a large sun with a painted face on the side of one of their sheds.

I don't know what makes these people "hipsters" maybe someone else can tell me. I will dip my toe into what I think people who use the term "hipster" are really getting at here and expand it a bit more later. Keeping chickens is something not everyone chooses to do and it is in fact something which is somewhat novel to many people. It could be seen as a fad or a hip thing to do. A person who bandies about the term "hipster" sees people who choose to keep chickens as someone who chooses to do something they would never do for no other reason than to be different, cool, or try to be hip. Keeping chickens is different from what many people choose to do and different is not something that many people like.

So maybe these chicken keepers in my neighborhood aren't "hipsters" because they have kept chickens for many years, they are doing it to provide food not because it's the "hip" thing to do. Maybe it's the people who keep chickens and give them up who are "hipsters."

I have a friend who kept chickens. He is an overweight fortysomething math teacher at a community college. He is married has a teenage son, a pre-teen daughter, a toddler and as of last week a new daughter, his mother also lives with his family in an attached mother in law cottage. He has unruly hair and has been known to leave the house in sweatpants. He kept several chickens but when his son started crawling that he didn't want his son to crawl in chicken shit and didn't want to keep the chickens that weren't allowed to roam in an open space. He decided that keeping chickens was no longer for him and gave them away. Is my friend a "hipster?" To me he sounds like a person that formerly kept chickens and found that continuing to keep chickens was no longer for him. I don't personally think that he needs a special derogatory category that accentuates his difference, I think he is just a person who chose for a time to keep chickens.

When I was a kid my father kept chickens. My dad wasn't particularly popular with his neighbors, he is a strange guy rubs many people the wrong way. He also kept bees and built me a stilt fort that stood fifteen feet off the ground these were both things that the neighbors tried to get the city to make his stop doing or tear down. The neighbors couldn't do anything about the bees or the stilt house, but the chickens were declared farm animals and my dad was forced to get rid of them. See my dad was different from the other neighbors, they couldn't relate to him, did their best to try to get him to live a life like their own. I don't think my dad, in his overalls with his checkbook tucked in one breast pocket and sunglasses in the other, mesh tank top clad, workboot shod, garden spade and pruners in the back pocket buzzcut sporting father was a "hipster", but he was different from most his neighbors, and they did their best to make him conform or be ostracized.

So maybe my friend or my dad isn't a "hipster." Maybe a "hipster" is a person who has chickens and gives them to a shelter or lets them starve to death when they realize that keeping chickens isn't for them. It's a pretty narrow definition but if you are comfortable with it I guess that is on you.

I work at a bar that is known as a "hipster" bar. People from out of town actually go there to see real "hipster" culture (I shit you not, hipster tourism is real). Let me give you a good idea of what 80-90% of the people who are regulars are like. We have salespeople, nurses, lots of skilled trade and construction workers, tech workers, accountants, cooks, bartenders, musicians, waiters, social workers, teachers, lobbyist, graphic designers, artist, city workers, landlords, call center workers, secretaries, retired people, Vietnam vets and clerks. Racially we have African Americans, West Africans, North Africans, Whites, Mexican Americans, Mexicans, South Americans, Irish Americans, a pair of Germans, Koreans, and Vietnamese Americans. We significant number of our clientele is gay and lesbian. While the average customer is a middle aged straight white person, the average probably holds it's own at about 50% and it's a pretty diverse crowd. I'd say that most regulars have no more than one or two degrees of separation, with most regulars knowing the name of and ready to sit down and have a chat with any other customer who comes in at their normal day or time, regardless or profession, race, sexual preference or social class.

Yet still people from out of town come to gawk at the bartender who has a beard that is grown down below his collarbone and ask if we are going to play Def Leppard, because evidently that is what "hipsters" listen to. Having enough space to park 25-30 bicycles and having all that space filled makes us a "hipster" bar, because what kind of people choose to ride bikes when they could drive cars. Because we don't serve redbull, or any energy drinks, we are an elitist hipster bar. Because we don't serve long islands, we are an elitist hipster bar. Because we don't serve drop shots ect... We have a fierce pour at a good price, we don't serve many sugary kiddie drinks, mostly because we don't want to fill the place with young folks slamming sugar shots and crashing thier cars on the way home.

It's basically a non homogeneous space where people freely mix and if you aren't ready to talk to sharply dressed gay or an old grizzled Vietnam vet then it's going to seem a bit different, and different has to be clearly delineated with derogatory language like "hipster" instead of "people who aren't all like me".

A local magazine posted a map that scraped yelp for all reviews that had the word "hipster" in it and made a handy map so that people could avoid having to rub shoulders with "hipsters" a while back. People loved it. One poster said something along the lines of "This is great, now we only need one that shows where all the blacks and hispanics are." It was a joke and it wasn't. The poster was obviously remarking that the map was a load of bigoted bullshit but the rest of the commenters didn't seem to think that it was a very witty comment. Their response was "Hey, this is just in fun, it's a joke and if you can't take you just don't understand and don't have a sense of humor." Let me tell you a joke I heard the other day, we'll see how this sits with you.

How do you hide something from a Nigger? Put it in a book!

I didn't laugh, in fact I pretty much did the opposite vocally. "It's just a joke, lighten up," I was told. I didn't lighten up. If any read here doesn't like that joke and bandies about the term "hipster" then they ought to examine what they are thinking. I'm sure many people think that I'm making an unfair analogy and that I ought to lighten up.

An analogy that I always liked was that of the American love of lawns to our conformist society. The perfect American lawn is uniformly green with every blade of grass cut to a perfectly uniform height. Every splotch of lawn that isn't uniformly green and perfectly uniform in height and similarities is a blemish. "hipster" is just the word for those who are different, who don't conform to a neat little box, have an odd hobby, wear a loud shit, like a different kind of music, or keep chickens. "Hipsters" are those who are brave enough or oblivious enough to do what they want instead of doing what everyone else does. "Hipsters" are in fact just people like everyone else, just like blacks are just people with different coloured skin and italians are people who were born in a different place. There is no sense in setting them aside with derogatory language, in fact it makes everyone poorer to set people aside just because they are different.

pseydtonne, as far as flouting whatever guidelines for polite decorum which you have set for yourself, I have to say that I set my own guidelines. I reserve a somewhat different set of guidelines when I protest what I think is ignorant and bigoted content. Truth be told my comments were made in hopes of igniting some attention toward the the phenomenon of "hipster" callouts, which didn't really catch on like I hoped. They were purposefully aimed at inciting some discussion of the issue but that didn't seem to take off like I hoped. It looks like you weren't around last time I took on a bit of what I perceived and still believe was racism on Hubski. It was quite a kerfuffle and was I believe a good deal more important than this "hipster" bit I've tried to explore here.

There are no rules to Hubski as far as conduct goes, it is a free speech zone and anyone is more than welcome to take umbrage and counter my speech with more delightful free speech.

I'm sure that my post could use an edit for brevity and content but I'd rather get it up here now rather than wait a few days when I am free of obligations. Time is pressing, I must wake and feed my daughter before I head to my "hipsterly" duties of getting people drunk.