History of Two Trendy Words

Found the following word histories for "goth" and "hipster," from Merriam-Webster and Salon.com, respectively.


Goth: This word contains over a thousand years of drama. In brief:

Around the fifth century, the Goths were a tribe that helped defeat the Roman Empire; by the 1500s, gothic meant "barbaric" and was used to insult a new style of architecture; that architecture became associated with the medieval age; ideas of medieval darkness and mystery inspired gothic fiction of the 1800s like Dracula.

All this eventually led, in the 1990s, to goth fashion – characterized by vampire-ish black clothes and eyeliner, and a preference for dark music and moody Romanticism.

Hipster:

Norman Mailer famously used the word to describe the middle-class whites who fetishized jazz culture in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, and in 1958 Jack Kerouac applied it to the members of the Beat Generation. For most of the twentieth century, it was used as a vague and usually pejorative term for a person with trendy countercultural interests.