Yuppie
Yuppie, an acronym for "Young Urban Professional," is a term coined by the advertising industry to describe a
demographic of people, primarily composed of the
Baby Boomer generation. Most commonly, they are highly educated and economically upwardly mobile, aged from early twenties to early- to mid-thirties. Yuppies tend to hold jobs in the
professional
sectors, with incomes that place them in the upper-middle economic class. The term "Yuppie" emerged in the early 1980s. Although the original yuppies were "young," the term now applies as well to people of
middle age.
Syndicated newspaper columnist
Bob Greene has been accused of having stolen the term "Yuppie" in one of his columns in the early
1980s, plagiarizing Alice Kahn who famously wrote about them in the
East Bay Express in 1982, but the first known citation of the word is in a
May 13,
1981 article titled "Chicago: City on the brink" by R. C. Longworth in the
Chicago Tribune.
The term is often used
pejoratively, with connotations of selfishness, materialism, and superficiality. In the novel
A Very British Coup, Prime Minister Harry Perkins comments on the greed of yuppies in a speech. In the
United States,
yuppie is frequently used in to describe anything that would appeal to American upper-middle-class tastes, including cars, supermarkets, and styles of decor.
The term "yuppies" has come to refer to more than just a demographic profile; it is also a
psychographic and geographic profile. It describes a set of behavioral and psychographic attributes that have come to constitute a commonly believed
stereotype.
According to the stereotype, yuppies are more
conservative than the hippies who preceded them. (In reality, many of the early yuppies were actually hippies in the 1960s.) Dispensing with the social causes of the hippies (who themselves had shed traditional values), yuppies tend to be "work hard, play hard" types. A cinematic example is the character Bud Fox, played by
Charlie Sheen, in the movie
Wall Street.
Yuppies tend to value material goods (especially trendy things) and are also supposed to have "bad taste" in that they buy expensive things merely for the sake of buying expensive things. An example would be the "yuppie" stereotype of those with a love for
Starbucks coffee. In particular this can apply to their
stocks, luxury
automobiles (e.g.
BMW,
Lexus,
Mercedes-Benz,
Saab,
Audi),
sport utility vehicles, development houses, and technological gadgets, particularly
cell phones,
laptops, and
PDAs. See
Conspicuous consumption.
The yuppies' fast-paced pursuit of material goods can have unintended consequences. Usually in a hurry, yuppies rely heavily on exorbitantly priced convenience goods and services, such as the occasionally ridiculed usage of the coffee house franchise Starbucks. Many of these yuppies are said to be "credit posers" and undertake a large amount of debt to maintain their outward image. Some of them, like the lower class, live "paycheck-to-paycheck"â€"their paychecks are just larger.
Heavily influenced by a
competitive corporate environment, yuppies often value those behaviors that they have found useful in gaining upward mobility and hence income and status. They often take their corporate values home to their spouses and children. Being "time poor," their family relations can become difficult to sustain. Ironically, their dense calendars are often mirrored and exacerbated by their children's, with every moment scheduled to fulfill athletic, artistic, and social obligations. Maintaining this way of life can be mentally exhausting. They frequently move every few years to follow their job, further straining their family. This fast-paced lifestyle has been termed a
rat race.
According to the stereotype, there is a certain air of informality about them, yet an entire code of unwritten etiquette can govern their activities from
golf,
tennis and
Lacrosse to luncheons at trendy cocktail bars. Many Yuppies today have begun to reflect the non-homicidal attitudes of one of the better-known and more notorious depictions of a yuppie,
Bret Easton Ellis' character
Patrick Bateman. From Ellis' controversial
1991 novel,
American Psycho, a satire lambasting the values of yuppies with a hyper-materialistic, murderously self-absorbed protagonist, Bateman excels at appearing outwardly concerned with social issues while inwardly remaining completely uncaring.
Yuppies tend to be associated with city or
suburban dwellers. The term is commonly used by rural folk and
good ol' boys in reference to people who live the stereotypical
urban or suburban lifestyle. Entire city districts have been associated with the yuppie phenomenon; in the
1980s and
1990s,
San Francisco's formerly working-class
Noe Valley neighborhood is similarly afflicted with yuppie-ism, not to mention
Houston's
Midtown,
Boston's
South End, and
Galleria districts (Houston's Midtown was once dominated by Vietnamese-run businesses until lofts were built in the mid-1990s). Similar accusations have been levelled against expensively renovated areasâ€"usually low-rent communitiesâ€"in a number of other cities around the world. See
gentrification.
I don't know what to make of some of these entries. But I can give readers the history behind the coining of this word - and who really coined it 'cause I was there. The writer Alice Kahn was, at the time, a nurse working at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley, CA. She, and the editor of the free weekly newspaper, The East Bay Express, met, became friends and with his encouragement, penned this article about the gentrification of Oakland's Rockridge Ave. (and West Berkeley?); how it was morphing into a gourmet ghetto, displacing WWII Black war vets and getting re-populated by "young urban professionals" whose newly found lifestyle now is an over-used stereotype. Now, maybe the term, "Young Urban Professional" existed before this story, but if it did, Kahn wouldn't have known. She was living in Berkeley and working in the entirely different, unrelated profession of nursing. In fact, the story was reprinted only weeks later in the "Chicago Reader." With its 200,000+ readership, The Reader was often credited for "breaking" this term. Maybe the aforementioned plagiarizing really happened in reverse. The Trib got it from the Reader. Back to Berkeley... When the article was in its final stages of editing, there was a buzz already in the office that this one was going to be good. All the proof readers were talking about this new writer. Even the layout artists were taking turns reading "the boards." (Remember, this was in the eighties - we were using hot wax to burnish the phototypeset strips of papers to layout boards.) But I'm getting ahead of myself. The publisher, a former writer herself, was going over the copy one last time before giving it over to typesetting. The art director needed a headline to design the cover with and deadline was approaching. The publisher didn't care too much for the way the story was written, there was something critically wrong with it - it lacked something but she didn't know what until it came to her. Throughout the story, the term used by Kahn was "YUPS." This, being Berkeley, near home of the Hippie, birthplace of the Yippie, the publisher gave the headline "Yuppie!" to the art director and when she did, she coined the word that Kahn took credit for the remainder of her writing career. The publisher came into my office, happy with her triumph and the fact that she one-upped the editor with such an obvious solution, and we went to lunch - at the Rockridge Cafe.
* A
Yumpie is a "young upwardly-mobile person". While this term is far less common, many confuse the derivation for
Yuppie with that of
Yumpie, and the two express broadly the same connotations anyway. Some sources (textbooks, even) state that
yuppie actually stands for "young upwardly-mobile person".
*
Yippie is sometimes used to refer to a person with
hippie values and attire but with yuppie consumer habits. However it is most often used to describe members of the Youth International Party, who have radically different views than the average yuppie.
* A
Yupster is a yuppie hipster, an upper-middle class professional who participates in the hipster cultural scene.
*
Buppie is a black urban professional.
*
Guppie is a
gay yuppie.
*
Puppie is a poor urban professional.
*
Yupmo is a crossover between a yuppie and an
emo.
*
Yuppify and
yuppification are terms used in place of the words
gentrify and
gentrification but with similarly negative connotations.
* A
yuppie slum or
yuppie ghetto refers to any neighborhood that is largely populated by a young well-off crowd, but often has other connotations of gentrification and rising rental and dining costs in a previously low-rent neighborhood.
* An
ORCHID is either member of a yuppie couple with a young child. The label is an acronym for
One Recent Child, Hideously In Debt.
* A
yuppie food stamp is a crisp US$20 note issued by an ATM.
*
DINKs (also
DINKY in the UK) are well-off couples who often have much in common with "yuppies". The label is an acronym for
Dual Income, No Kids [Yet].
*
SITCOMs are former yuppies or DINKs. The label is an acronym for
Single Income Two Children Oppressive Mortgage.
*
Yuppicide is the killing of Yuppies, and
vehicular yuppicide is the act of wrecking a yuppie's
BMW. A
New York-based
hardcore/
punk band in the
1990s called themselves
Yuppicide.
*
Yuppie Flu is a term formerly applied to
Chronic fatigue syndrome, before that condition's general acceptance as a genuine medical problem.
*
Organic Yuppies is a term used in the
UK for yuppies and
middle class thirtysomethings obsessed with food and wine.
*
David Brooks characterized yuppies as
bourgeois bohemians, or
Bobos, in his book
Bobos in Paradise. (Aka
Trustifarians.)
* A variation,
yuffie, is a young-urban-failure, or more generally a failed yuppie.
*
Boughie (pronounced
BĹŤĹŤ-zheeâ€"an abbreviation of the word
Bourgeois), is a derogatory term originated in
African American Vernacular English, and used to describe an African-American of lower-class origins, who has elevated into "upper-crust", and has forgotten (or, has chosen to forget) about their true origins.
Boughies tend to have fancy or refined tastes, style, and manner in the interest of appearing more cultured or sophisticated than their ordinary upbringing would suggest. The term is used prominently by many
black stand-up comedians, in urban films like
Boyz N the Hood (1991), and in television sitcoms such as
The Jeffersons.
*
Hippie*
Yippie*
Hipster*
Model Minority*
Sellout
