Yuppie

A yuppie (/ˈjʌpi/; short for "young urban professional" or "young upwardly-mobile professional")^[1][2] is defined by one source as being "a young college-educated adult who has a job that pays a lot of money and who lives and works in or near a large city".^[3] This acronym first came into use in the early 1980s.

Characteristics

Author and political commentator Victor Davis Hanson has written:

Yuppism... is not definable entirely by income or class. Rather, it is a late-20th century cultural phenomenon of self-absorbed young professionals, earning good pay, enjoying the cultural attractions of sophisticated urban life and thought, and generally out of touch with, indeed antithetical to, most of the challenges and concerns of a far less well-off and more parochial Middle America. For the yuppie male a well-paying job in tech, law, finance, academia or consulting in a cultural hub, hip fashion, cool appearance, studied poise, elite education, proper recreation and fitness and general proximity to liberal-thinking elites, especially of the more rarefied sort in the arts, are the mark of a real man.^[4]

History

Joseph Epstein was credited for coining the term in 1982,^[5] although this is contested. The first printed appearance of the word was in a May 1980 Chicago magazine article by Dan Rottenberg.^[6] The term gained currency in the United States in 1983 when syndicated newspaper columnist Bob Greene published a story about a business networking group founded in 1982 by the former radical leader Jerry Rubin, formerly of the Youth International Party (whose members were called yippies); Greene said he had heard people at the networking group (which met at Studio 54 to soft classical music) joke that Rubin had "gone from being a yippie to being a yuppie". The headline of Greene's story was From Yippie to Yuppie.^[7][8] East Bay Express humorist Alice Kahn claimed to have coined the word in a 1983 column. This claim is disputed.^[9][10] The proliferation of the word was affected by the publication of The Yuppie Handbook in January 1983 (a tongue-in-cheek take on The Official Preppy Handbook^[11]), followed by Senator Gary Hart's 1984 candidacy as a "yuppie candidate" for President of the United States.^[12] The term was then used to describe a political demographic group of socially liberal but fiscally conservative voters favoring his candidacy.^[13] Newsweek magazine declared 1984 "The Year of the Yuppie", characterizing the salary range, occupations, and politics of yuppies as "demographically hazy".^[12] The alternative acronym yumpie, for young upwardly mobile professional, was also current in the 1980s but failed to catch on.^[14]

In a 1985 issue of The Wall Street Journal, Theressa Kersten at SRI International described a "yuppie backlash" by people who fit the demographic profile yet express resentment of the label: "You're talking about a class of people who put off having families so they can make payments on the SAABs ... To be a Yuppie is to be a loathsome undesirable creature". Leo Shapiro, a market researcher in Chicago, responded, "Stereotyping always winds up being derogatory. It doesn't matter whether you are trying to advertise to farmers, Hispanics or Yuppies, no one likes to be neatly lumped into some group".^[12]

The word lost most of its political connotations and, particularly after the 1987 stock market crash, gained the negative socio-economic connotations that it sports today. On April 8, 1991, Time magazine proclaimed the death of the yuppie in a mock obituary.^[15]

The term has experienced a resurgence in usage during the 2000s and 2010s. In October 2000, David Brooks remarked in a Weekly Standard article that Benjamin Franklin – due to his extreme wealth, cosmopolitanism, and adventurous social life – is "Our Founding Yuppie".^[16] A recent article in Details proclaimed "The Return of the Yuppie", stating that "the yuppie of 1986 and the yuppie of 2006 are so similar as to be indistinguishable" and that "the yup" is "a shape-shifter... he finds ways to reenter the American psyche."^[17] Victor Davis Hanson also recently wrote in National Review very critically of yuppies.^[4]

Usage outside of the United States

Yuppie was in common use in Britain from the early 1980s onwards and by 1987 had spawned subsidiary terms used in newspapers such as yupiedom, yuppification, yuppify and yuppie-bashing.^[18]

A September 2010 article in The Standard described the items on a typical Hong Kong resident's "yuppie wish list" based on a survey of 28- to 35-year-olds. About 58% wanted to own their own home, 40% wanted to professionally invest, and 28% wanted to become a boss.^[19] A September 2010 article in the New York Times defined as a hallmark of Russian yuppie life adoption of yoga and other elements of Indian culture such as their clothes, food, and furniture.^[20]

In Mexico, the term "yupi" is a neologism for high class young people usually from the largest cities and known for having a modern white-collar economy. Yuppification has occurred in economic booming nations of China, India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and South Africa in the late 1990s and 2000s.

In popular culture

• Yuppie Drone, The Pheremones' 1985 hit.^[21]
• In Duck Dynasty, Phil Robertson uses the term to describe one who had adapted to the urban lifestyle or a city slicker, and could not hold their own if they were to have to go into survival mode. Robertson often calls his sons and daughters-in-law yuppies.^[22]
• The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe, a "satire of yuppie excess"^[23]
• Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney^[24] (McInerney himself has been called "the archetypal yuppie")^[25]
• Family Ties, the TV show, features a young Michael J. Fox as the Republican coat-and-tie-wearing 'yuppie-in-the-making' Alex P. Keaton and his parents (played by Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter-Birney) as former hippies.^[26]
• Fight Club, the 1996 Chuck Palahniuk novel and 1999 film adaptation, follows "a disenchanted yuppie ... numbed by the sterile materialism of modern life."^[27]
• In John Carpenter's They Live, a pair of working class protagonists come into possession of sunglasses that reveal yuppies as predatory aliens.
• Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace, a short story about a young Republican enjoying life after prep school with a group of punk rockers.^[28]
• Slaves of New York by Tama Janowitz^[24] describes a later (early 1990s) evolution of the Yuppie, in which the upper tier made considerably more than the lower, supporting tier, the "slaves" of the title, who were trapped by rents and insufficient salaries into a struggle merely to stay afloat in Manhattan.
• American Psycho, the 1991 Bret Easton Ellis novel and 2000 film about yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman.^{[29][30][31][32][33][34][35]}
• thirtysomething, U.S. TV series, seen as a representation of "yuppie angst" and midlife crisis.^[36]
• Stuff White People Like, a satirical blog that pokes fun at generalizations and yuppie culture.^[37]
• Wall Street, the 1987 film about stock traders, has been described as "encapsulation of 80s yuppie greed culture", particularly Bud Fox, Charlie Sheen's naive 20-something character.^[38]
• Dr. Snow, the 1988 true-crime novel by Carol Saline tells the story of the FBI's four-year(1982-1986) investigation/manhunt that brought down the cocaine distribution ring engineered by Philadelphia dentist Larry Lavin(a.k.a. "Dr. Snow") and his Ivy League college mates, in what the Bureau recorded in its annals as "The Yuppie Conspiracy".
• "Yuppy Love", a 1989 Only Fools and Horses episode based on Gordon Gekko from Wall Street, in which Del Boy reinvents himself as a yuppy and hangs out in trendy wine bars.^[39] Del's attempts at reinventing himself as a 'Yuppy' were a recurring theme over the next few seasons.
• National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, a 1989 comedy, features neighbors Todd and Margo as the quintessential yuppies.^[40]
• Married... with Children, a Fox TV comedy sitcom (1987–97) featured the Bundy's neighbors: A couple led by twice married Marcy D'Arcy (her two husbands Steve Rhodes and Jefferson D'Arcy, are upwardly mobile men she's attracted to), a bipolar paleoliberal-neoconservative feminist banker who loathes their blue-collar neighbors and she bullies Al Bundy, a failed shoe salesman.
• Jeff Goldblum's character in the 1983 movie The Big Chill is a quintessential yuppie who sold out his 1960s hippie ideals for money.
• The Last Days of Disco features male characters in the early 1980s who complain that they are referred to as yuppies.
• King of the Hill features the Hill Family's next door neighbors, Kahn Souphanousinphone, Sr. and his wife, Minh. They are stereotypical yuppies based on that stereotype about Asian Americans since Khan and Minh are Laotians originally from Laos then moved to the U.S. through Anaheim, California, a known yuppie cultural center in Southern California and finally they ended up in fictional Arlen, Texas.
• "Yer So Bad" song by rock singer Tom Petty features the verse "My sister got lucky, married a Yuppie"
• "Paranoid Android", a song from Radiohead's OK Computer album, features the lines "The dust and the screaming/The yuppies networking"
• "Ghosts of the Overdoses", a song from Damien Dempsey's "Seize the Day" album, features the line "From the cities, to make way for all the Yuppies"
• Irish soap opera Fair City had a week-long special in 2005 looking at the murkier side of yuppie life against the backdrop of property speculation reflecting the Celtic Tiger.^[41]
• Alex, a long-running comic strip that features archetypal Yuppie characters.
• An episode of Portlandia entitled "Pull Out King" features a sketch in which a character played by Jello Biafra awakes from a 28-year coma to discover that the world has been overrun by Yuppies (who variously identify themselves as actually being "Foodies," "Yogies," and one couple clarifying, "It's a Corgi!")

Related terms

• Commentator David Brooks characterized yuppies as bourgeois bohemians, or Bobos, in his book Bobos in Paradise - the term became somewhat popular in the 2000s.
• A buppie is a black urban professional.^[42]
• A huppie is a Hispanic/Latino urban professional.
• A guppie is a gay urban professional ^[43]
• DINKs (DINKY in the UK) is an acronym is for Dual Income, No Kids [Yet];^[44][45] at least one authority considers this to be synonymous with "yuppie".^[46]
• A scuppie is a Socially Conscious Upwardly-Mobile Person (the term is not commonly used).^[47][48]
• A Brazilian playboy: while in first this term had the same usage as in English, from the 1990s to the 2010s it changed its meaning to a local version of yuppie which first appeared in Greater Rio de Janeiro. Stereotypes of the Brazilian playboys include being classist, womanizer and sexist, at least way more than their yuppie counterparts from more developed countries, which in turn is result of social anxieties of the poor and the lower middle class against the upper middle and upper classes, or being great seekers of social status and influence. They also, contrary to yuppies, do not fashionize intellectuality, and can or can not be socially liberal (social divisions between liberals and conservatives, specially in the upper classes, makes much less sense in Brazil than in the Anglosphere). In the 2000s, some lower middle and middle middle class Brazilians from Greater São Paulo formed a new urban subculture also called playboy which is little to not related to the former. Non-urban young professionals in Brazil are called by the slang agroboy. Also in São Paulo, the term coxinha gained more currency in the late-2000s, making playboy fall out in the early 2010s, when the usage spread around Brazil, especially after the 2013 Brazilian protests.^[49][50]
• A winder is a young individual, uninhibited with regards to its own social success,^[51] and willing to comply only to a very soft (and versatile) set of moral standards.^[52]
• Yuppification often replaces the word gentrification; it is the act of making something, someone, or someplace appealing and thus marketable to yuppie tastes.^[53]
• Yuppie flu was a sometimes derisive, and inaccurate, term applied to chronic fatigue syndrome.^[54]
• Yuppie food stamp is a slang term in the United States for a $20 bill, because ATMs there typically dispense only $20 bills.
• Puppie is a poor urban professional (a.k.a. welfie and cheapie).
• YURP is a term describing the diverse group of young professionals who are dedicated to rebuilding New Orleans, and many low-income locals accuse them of "carpetbaggery".
• Yuppie Angst is when a yuppie experiences stress in pursuing a busy work schedule, anxiety attacks over minor fears or challenges, reckless driving on highways and overreacting in panic.
• Yuppie Puppy, derogatory term, synonymous with Malibu Barbie or Malibu Ken i.e. the vacuous overly spoiled and narcissistic offspring of the aforementioned Yuppies.
• Yuppiedom, a mockery of the term "kingdom" or a place of yuppies.
• Yuppie Values, also a mocking of core beliefs, trends and behavioral traits of yuppies as more of upper-income liberalism or an evolution of "Hippie values" about trying new or exotic things while pursuing a money-based life.

See also

• Capitalism
• Early adopter
• Fad
• Gentrification
• Gold-collar worker
• Hipster
• Liberal elite (a.k.a. Latte Liberal or Limousine liberal)
• Model minority
• Paninaro
• Preppy
• Selling out
• Sloane Ranger
• Valley girl
• White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP)
• Young professional

References

Further reading

• Lowy, Richard (June 1991). "Yuppie Racism: Race Relations in the 1980s". Journal of Black Studies (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications) 21 (4): 445–464. doi:10.1177/002193479102100405. ISSN 0021-9347. 

External links

Look up yuppie in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Yuppies entry in the St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture