Talk:Yuppie

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[edit] Young Upwardly-Mobile

Stop and think for a minute and you'll realize that the term "yuppie" originally had nothing to do with being "urban"; nor was it about being a "professional," i.e., a practitioner of a profession such as medicine, law, or accounting. This was an abbreviation, not an acronym, and it simply referred to a choice of lifestyle and/or life goals: young, and upwardly-mobile, as in upward in social status and/or income level. It was coined as a wordplay on "yippie" — the latter being politically motivated, and the former, in contrast, being apolitical or political only to the extent that political involvement could affect social standing or income. And, yes, for obvious reasons, it was a pejorative term from the get-go (though the persons it describes would be the last to care about its negative connotations).

Most of the people to whom it applied were not particularly urban, and not particularly professional, nor was their lack of political committedness particularly relevant to the categorization.

A poll of news stories and op-ed pieces from the late 70s and early 80s will quickly confirm this.

rowley 04:53, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Hmm... My graduate school friends and I were using "yuppie" in the late 1970's to mean specifically "young urban professional" (not "upwardly mobile") and it was a positive stereotype. I don't know where I first heard it. It was obviously a take-off on "hippie" and "yippie," and referred to ex-hippies who were fixing up urban houses and gentrifying their neighborhoods. - Larry Siegel

[edit] NPOV?

The list of common traits seems erroneous and inappropriate from an NPOV standpoint. It seems that the article would be more encyclopedic in nature if this list was simply removed. Any thoughts?PsYoP78 16:38, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Young Uncommitted Professional

Contrary to all the dictionaries I've seen, I believe the word 'yuppie' or yuppy' originally came from the acronym YUP = Young Uncommitted Professional. This was a term used by US political pollsters in the late 60's to 70's when they found that many young professionals were neither Republicans nor Democrats.

Unfortunately I have no evidence to back this up (yet).

Besides, who ever heard of a Young Rural Professional.


I was aware of the term Yuppie in the mid 1980s in Australia (it seemed to be much overused, actually) but always thought it was derived from "Young and Upwardly-mobile Professionals". As for it being coined in the early 1980s I somehow seem to recall once seeing a rerun of the first episode of Knots Landing (produced late 1979) in which the character Richard Ward uses to term "yuppie". MinorEdit June 28, 2005 06:54 (UTC)



  • Err... "psychographic" Evidently somebody thought this word sounds real nice. But I think it's the wrong word for the job (in addition to sounding stupid and pretentious). If you mean psychological, say psychological.

Yuppie comes from the first letters of Young Urban Professional, plus the diminuitive ending -ie (a form of -y). This is just like "Hippies" which comes from Hip (as in "cool") plus -ie. Yuppie is also frequently considered as coming from the first letters of Young Upwardly mobile Professional (or People or Person), plus the diminuitive ending, but there is also a word "Yumpie" which more accurately fits that etymology.



[edit] Citified

I'm not sure about y'all, but I (like many of my friends) grew up using the term "yuppy" to denote anyone who was "citified" to the point of being the cityfolk version of / antithesis to a "redneck" or "hick".

one more thing, making your own words by adding -ified to the end of them, guess what, that's a 'redneck' kind of thing too

I'm reminded of an episode of the sitcom "Seinfeld" in which a main character discovers his pet chicken is crowing. His friend (Jerry) informs him that it's "not a chicken, that's a rooster". Of course most people would consider it common knowledge that a male chicken is called a rooster and a female chicken is called a hen. Saying, "that's not a chicken, that's a rooster" is therefore equivalent to saying "that's not a human, that's a man". Most people who've had the bennefit of growing up outside of the urban jungle learn such things at an early age; learning the difference between a rooster and a hen, a cockeral and a pullet, a buck and a doe, a bull and a cow, a peacock and peahen, etc., etc., comes right along with learning the difference between a boy and a girl, learning shapes and colors, numbers, and other such concepts.

what the hell are you talking about?? why would I want to know what the propper farm term for a rooster is?? If you know that, I feel sorry for you

At this point you're probably wondering what the point of this rant is. Well, to state it simply, those of us who live outside of the city generally use the word "yuppie" as a pejorative, directed at the urban equivalent of the "uneducated" country-dweller.


I don't think so. At least the modern definition of a yuppie is usually suburban.

Basically, if someone can tell you exactly how much it will cost you to take a taxi cab from 1,439,782nd street to 2,986,349th avenue but can't even tell you how many flakes of straw there are to a bail, or takes more condaments on his hotdogs than you've ever even heard of yet doesn't know that bacon and ham come from the same critter -- well, that's pretty much the definition of a "yuppy". It's someone who has become so utterly urbanized that she's become just as ignorant and clueless as redneck.

you are a redneck, and this is a stupid arguement

That's how I've always understood the term, anyway. --Corvun 10:30, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Flakes of straw? There's a set number of flakes to a bale? What the hell is that? ;) [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 16:20, 2004 Jul 27 (UTC)
I definitely come down in favor of "Young Urban Professional". I definitely agree it is more often (mis-)used in the senses discussed here. I clearly remember reading an article in Time magazine, sometime in the very early 80s, discussing the phenomenon of Young Urban Professionals. The point was that, for the first time since WWII, such people were moving, voluntarily, into urban ares, away from the suburbs they often grew up in (rural areas were not really in play). --Erik Neu 2004 Dec 27 (UTC)

I'm growing up in Manhattan, New York City, raised by a yuppie mother and a hippy father, I've always thought that yuppies are young workaholics who drink way too much Starbucks and do what's trendy. I don't know if this is exactly right, as it's just what I've been told, but the definition currently in this article, though giving some ideas for what the history of the term yuppie might be, doesn't explain the term yuppie at all. My definition is that yuppies (Young Urban Professionals) are the trendy young middle-upper class grandkids of the baby boom, they wake up at 5:00-6:00 in the morning, "dresses for success", go to Starbucks, go to jobs in things like public relations, are stingy with money and what they eat, relentlessly improve their position. Of course this would need to be translated into formal writing for wikipedia. People have different views on this lifestyle. I for one am scared of yuppies and therefore Starbucks. But I think it's much easier for someone who lives in a city like New York to explain yuppies then for country folk to. Normally, if I try to explain the term yuppie to someone in the city who doesn't know what it means, after just half this sentence "young upper-middle class workaholics who drink lots of starbucks." and they know exactly what type of person I'm talking about. It's much harder to explain to someone who lives in a rural area. I think in order to understand yuppies, it's easiest to grow up in a city environment. You really have to see a few yuppies in order to be able to understand them. Zaphod Beeblebrox 05:32, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Irony

"Ironically, some "Yuppies" have found their wealth was over financed by credit, and therefore find themselves in heavy debt."

Someone's been listening to too much Alanis Morrisette...

[edit] Friends?

"In many cases, in the late 1990s, yuppies looked and sounded a lot like the cast of Friends" Uh, nah, I don't think that's an accurate comparision... For most of the series, the cast of friends aren't professionals. Only Ross and Chandler went to university. pomegranate 20:04, Nov 27, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Dubious use of "yippie"

"Yuppie" was understood at the time it was introduced as a variant on "yippie," and there was even a Jerry Rubin/Abbie Hoffman road show called "are you a yippie or a yuppie?"

Yippie has a well established meaning, and I have never encountered the "new" and very different meaning of yippie that is claimed in this entry. (Indeed, this meaning is very close to the definition of "yuppie.") Nor can I find any occurence of it by searching the web. Can anyone offer evidence that this version of "yippie" is really in general circulation? I think multiple refernces in print should be the minimum requirement to assert that a word has been re-defined. Until then, I'm deleting the whole "yippie" section on grounds that it is completely unsubstantiated.



...hm...i read the term "young up-coming professional" for yuppie in a schoolbook. does this term exist? or is it just wrong?

[edit] The many flavours of Yuppies

The term Yuppie started as a demographic term. The three demographic variables employed in the lifestyle label were age, occupation, and geographical density. That is, the term described educated professionals, in their twenties or early thirties, who were moving back into the downtown core of cities. But grafted onto this basic definition are a wide range of psychographic variables including ambitiousness, hard working, materialistic, sophisticated, etc. The problem with these psychographic variables is that they are very difficult to research, infact they are little more than stereotypes and prejudices. Also different people have constructed different psychographic profiles, based on their particular experiences and biases (as is evidenced by the preceding discussion). In popular culture, these stereotypes are what remains of a once legitimate description. mydogategodshat 01:36, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I believe that yuppies may live in the suburbs as well.

[edit] Sourcing of stereotypes

I am concerned about the stereotypes, many of which don't sound at all familiar to me (Yuppies are Republicans? I thought they were Democrats.) Of course, I may be wrong, but they are not sourced at all. See Wikipedia's guidelines on source citation. Do we have sources for these stereotypes? -Elliotreed 20:45, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

"Bourgie" did not originate in African-American Vernacular English, but amongst white counterculture and punk rocker types in the 1970s. This may be the few cases of a slang term originating amongst whites being adapted by African-Americans (usually things work the other way around) - Myfriendstan 0:33, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Musical Reference

Switchfoot has a song entitled "Happy Is a Yuppie Word". DOn't know if this is appropriate for the article, as there's no section for it.


[edit] Merge DINKY (acronym) here

I think it should be merged here. Wikipedia is not a Wiktionary, and since it's refer to the same reality, they should be merged. We can explain in the beginning of the article that beside the term of "yuppie", the term "DINK" (Double Income No Kids) has also been used. Lapaz 00:20, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Disagree - IMHO - DINKY refers to DUAL income - i.e. a couple. Yuppie as a term refers to single person. Also I think the demographics are different. Also, you can be a DINKY couple, without being a Yuppies. Megapixie 06:31, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
Disagree, for the reasons stated by Megapixie. Funnyhat 04:04, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
Disagree, for the reasons stated by Megapixie. Ratarsed 19:51, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
Disagree, for the reasons stated by Megapixie. Jack Daw 18:35, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Origins of the term are in slightly different context

Yuppie, short for "Young Urban Professional," describes a demographic of people primarily comprising the children or grandchildren of the baby boomer generation. Most commonly, they are highly-educated and upwardly-mobile and are aged from early twenties to early-to-mid thirties, circa 2006. 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.

I think that is a pretty inaccurate, and self-contradicting, set of statements. The term originated in the early-eighties to describe the new generation of professionals moving into the big U.S. inner-cities that had been on the decline for two decades, but still had some cultural life left. I think in that original context, large yuppie populations only really existed in NYC, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and Philidelphia. It was the first reversal of white flight. The term now is really kind of obsolete, since the yuppie lifestyle has become co-opted as the national standard. When a person today in suburban Houston is described as a Yuppie because they drive a certain automobile, the term doesn't carry meaning anymore. It's like trying to defining a hippie without focusing on the late sixties.

At school in the UK (1980s) I was tought that it meant "young upwardly mobile person". --kingboyk 21:05, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

As a 35 year old who grew up in Chicago's Lake View & Lincoln Park neighborhoods (one of the ground zero spawning grounds for yuppies) I agree with Kingboyk here, and I'll explain why.

The distinction made regarding young upwardly mobile professionals was that in the early 80s there was suddenly a large infusion of people with money, who were in the city to pursue careers, but not to raise families. So besides the fact that they had different goals than the natives, they also didn't stay long, something which has changed a bit decades later, but not that much, people still move into the cities for the nightlife and then leave when they get married and their kids come of school age.

The reason for the distinction is that the appearance of this new demographic was unwelcome in many parts of the city As part of their moving around the city looking for neighborhoods that were hip & had nightlife, "yuppies" tended to both rehab old buildings and have new ones built, which changed the housing stock, incresed property taxes for everyone, and in general tended to both push out blue collar industry and poorer city residents, in addition to pushing out the artists/musicians that attracted them into poor neighborhoods in the first place- hence the culture clash phenomenon, which in a nutshell could be boiled down to, yuppies don't assimilate, they gentrify.

The phrase yuppie was being used everywhere IN the city - so the phrase "urban" is redundant. People in the city don't call each other "urban" anything, and many people in the city are "professional," but don't even remotely fit the stereotype of a yuppie.

I agree that the definition "young urban professional" eventually became more popular, but as another mentioned, it's such a generic term it's meaningless, it lost its currency when the big industrial cities lost their factories and there wasn't this clear-cut distinction between the white and blue collar folks. The dawning of the computer age means many people working desk/office jobs might be considered professional, but a huge number aren't upwardly mobile (many of these jobs are administrative/clerical/customer service, etc). Even the folks serving coffee at Starbucks are professional "barristas," with some sort of benefits, a tucked in shirt, etc. On the other hand, where the unions still persist, the old blue collar professions are often far higher paying than the current white collar ones.

As far as understanding the history of the cities, not to mention the current & seemingly never-ending turf wars related to gentrification, I think it's important to understand the significance of the upwardly-mobile aspect. - Carter

[edit] Age discrepency

Most commonly, they are highly-educated and upwardly-mobile and are aged from early twenties to early-to-mid thirties, circa 2006. 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.

There is a discrepency here. Yuppies were the children and grand-children of baby boomers, but anyone in their early twenties to early-to-mid thirties today is too young to be a Yuppie. Anyone in that given age range wouldn't have even been an adult yet in the early eighties, when the term was coined to describe young, self-centered professionals.

I mostly agree with Kingboyk's description above, except for his belief that they were mostly newer, inner-city dwellars in certain US cities. Yuppies did mostly exist in US cities, but I'm not sure if they existed any more frequently in larger cities than they did in smaller ones. I'm almost inclined to say they existed even more frequently in smaller US cities because of white-flight, rather than as a result of it, as Kingboyk would imply.

[edit] sources tag

I know there was a sources tag in the references section, but I put one up top to remind everybody working on this article that there is no reference material whatsoever. It's not so much an article as a bunch of people arguing over what they think it means with plentiful IMO's. And that last paragraph, umm... right... I'm nominating this for deletion.--Loodog 18:53, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Anti Yuppie Web Site

This site is politically incorrect: http://www.infoshop.org/myep.html

[edit] Materialist/Materialism

The word "materialist" in the first line of the article is used wrongly. I propose a replacement with another world.

evidence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialist

[edit] "Suppie"

Google showed the term "suppie" as meaning "southern", "suburban" or "senior" urban professional, but not "snobby". Unless some reference can be cited for this use, it really can't go in. -GTBacchus(talk) 08:11, 28 October 2006 (UTC)


[edit] The Origin of Yuppies in Berkeley (or: a short history of scum)

The term yuppie did indeed originate in Berkeley, California, a city of 100,000 souls directly across the bay from San Francisco and containing what is generally considered to be the nation's finest public university. The term yippie (youth international party, courtesy Jerry Rubin & Abbie Hoffmann) originated in Berkeley in the midst of its massive, violent demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and the point of changing the one vowel into yuppie (young urban professional, courtesy columnist-turned-nurse Alice Kahn) was to ridicule how the culture of radical politics that defined the city in the 1960s gave way to a culture of precious upper-crust gourmet consumerism in the 1980s. It was in Berkeley that Alice Waters founded Chez Pannise in the early 70s and invented the New American cuisine; she's the reason you can now find goat cheese, balsamic vinegar, and ten different kinds of lettuce at your local Midwestern supermarket, which was certainly not the case in 1980. Surrounding Waters' restaurant in North Berkeley was a variety of shops selling gourmet cheese, bread, chocolate, coffee (Peet's Coffee, owned by the man who opened a cafe in Seattle called Starbucks before selling it and moving south, started in Berkeley in the mid-70s) as well as books, homemade crafts, and studios offering meditation and yoga (again, now these are ubiquitous, but not then); this neighborhood became known as the Gourmet Ghetto, and was seen as the symbol of how the revolution was co-opted. These businesses sold themselves as being a part of the idealistic leftist culture--the Cheese Board, for example, is one of the country's oldest cooperatively run retail stores--and helped turn all these former hippies, now flush with cash due to their jobs in the dawn of the tech era (many Berkeley residents made the 40-minute commute to their desks in Silicon Valley--usually in a Honda Civic adorned with a Greenpeace bumper sticker, radio set on KPFA or KQED) into a class of narcissistic lifestyle fetishists who convinced themselves that they were continuing the activism of their youth and embodying back-to-the-land values by spending huge amounts of their time and discretionary income waiting in line at the Cheese Board for fresh baguettes (when they weren't going to Grateful Dead concerts and No-Nuke rallies, that is.) In other words: the original yuppies were liberal Democrats, financed by the tech boom of the early 80s and designed to give former hippies and activists a way to join the mainstream while maintaining a unique identity; the yuppie Republican trend was a late 90s phenomenon, in sync with Wall Street's irrational exuberance, and was intended to make those twentysomething MBAs feel as hip as their friends in the bands they would go out to see on the weekends (you can still occasionally spot them; he's that goateed and t-shirted guy reading Atlas Shrugged while sipping espresso in a Williamsburg cafe.) The yuppie should also not be confused with the habits of liberal Jews on New York's Upper West Side (go to a foreign or independent art-house film on Saturday night, wake up the next morning to the bagels-and-lox-and-newspaper ritual), which is related but has different cultural origins. A better modern example of yuppie infestation can be found in Brooklyn's Park Slope, though they would all self-righteously deny it, of course, while on their way to enroll their kid at a private school, after which they'll go out for some Thai... 207.38.181.12 20:19, 8 December 2006 (UTC)James

Great, cite some sources for that, trim it down, and we have an article.--Loodog 05:00, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
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