Nobody’s a hipster on Queen St. W., unless you’re talking about someone else.

The catch-all term for urbane, non-conformist city dwellers gets thrown around a lot, yet people seem reluctant to identify themselves by that mantle. Defining the word is a different matter.

“You can spot a hipster from a mile away,” said Kayla Rocca, listing the telltale signs from her bench in Trinity Bellwoods Park: tattoos, cut-off shirts, skinny jeans, vintage apparel, beards, bicycles, thick-rimmed glasses (prescription optional) and an affinity for obscure music and independent movies.

“They strive to be different, and yet they’re a cohesive group,” added Rocca’s friend, Angie Ruffilli. “And they’re never athletic,” she laughed.

So where does this metropolitan character dwell in Toronto, this city of many neighbourhoods? Is it more hip to sip Americanos in Little Italy than to down pints at a Parkdale pub? Do the cool kids hang loose in the Junction, or do they haunt Ossington Ave.?

There may now be an answer.

Last week, restaurant and bar review site Yelp unveiled a new “wordmap” function, where a selection of keywords culled from more than 39 million user-submitted reviews in the first quarter of the year were used to plot hot spots for certain terminology. The tool was introduced for major cities such as New York, London, Paris and Toronto, where Yelp charted areas where words like “hipster,” “romantic” and “tourist” were most commonly used in reviews.

In Toronto’s case, the “hipster” heat map shows a deep red swath over Kensington Market, while the thickest concentration of perceived hipsterism runs along Queen St. W., from about Spadina Ave. to Dufferin St., and up Ossington Ave. to Dundas St.

Yet even in the apparent hipster heartlands, it’s difficult to find someone who wears the term as a badge of honour.

“I don’t know anybody who self-identifies as hipster,” said Kay Jorgensen, 23, who works reception at a west-end ad agency. “It’s a label that’s put onto others.”

Paul Mullins, an anthropologist at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, said this reluctance to self-identify is what makes the hipster subculture different than other more iconoclastic movements, like goths or punks.

“It has become a nasty, castaway word,” said Mullins, arguing the use of the word is often derogatory, meant as a put-down for people perceived to possess a self-styled “authentic” look that isn’t all too original — they’re seen as anticonformist conformists, essentially. “It’s consumer politics,” Mullins said.

He added that the term dates back to the 1940s and 1950s, when it was connected with a rejection of the “white” values of mainstream America, such as suburban living and the nuclear family. It made a resurgence in the late 1990s, and has since been associated with a sort of early-adopter, “hipper than thou” sense of superiority. Hipsters are the first ones in on the new bands, for instance.

“Hipster, in its revival, referred to an air of knowing about exclusive things before anyone else,” wrote journalist Mark Greif in a 2010 feature on the movement for New York Magazine.

Chris Loane, a manager at the Drake Hotel, which sits smack dab in the hotbed of hipsterism outlined in the Yelp map, said the establishment takes a balanced approach to the idea of hipsterism. The aim is to position oneself as a harbinger of cool without alienating potential customers — to be hipster in vibe, if not in name, Loane said.

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“We want to be on that curve, or on that crest, without being arrogant about it,” he said. “We tend to stay away from that term.”

They’re not alone.