Yuppie
From Freepedia
Yuppie, short for "Young Urban Professional," describes a demographic of people comprising baby boomers as well as people in their late twenties and early thirties. Yuppies tend to hold jobs in the professional sector, with incomes that place them in the upper-middle economic class. The term "Yuppie" emerged in the early 1980s as an ironic echo of the earlier "hippies" and "yippies" who had rejected the materialistically oriented values of the business community. Although the original yuppies were "young," the term now applies as well to people of middle age.
Syndicated newspaper columnist Bob Greene is generally credited with having stolen the term "Yuppie" in one of his columns in the early 1980s, plagerizing 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 entitled "Chicago: City on the brink" by R. C. Longworth in the Chicago Tribune.
The term is often used pejoratively, with an emphasis on the connotations of "yuppies" as selfish and superficial. In the novel A Very British Coup, the Prime Minister Harry Perkins comments on the greed of Thatcherite yuppies in a speech.
The yuppie stereotype
The term "yuppies" has come to refer to more than just a demographic profile: it is also a psychographic profile. It describes a set of behavioural 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 and early 1970s). Dispensing with the social causes of the hippies (who themselves shed traditional values), yuppies tend to be "work hard / play hard" types. A cinematic example is Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street.
Yuppies tend to value material goods (especially trendy new things) and are also supposed to have "bad taste" or buy expensive things for the sake of buying expensive things. In particular this can apply to their stocks, luxury automobiles (e.g. BMW, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz), sport utility vehicles, development houses, and technological gadgets, particularly cell phones.
The yuppies' fast-paced pursuit of material goods can have unintended consequences. Usually in a hurry, "yuppies" may seek convenience goods and services. Being "time poor," their family relations can become difficult to sustain. Maintaining their way of life is mentally exhausting. Sometimes, they will move every few years to where their job goes, straining their family. This fast-paced lifestyle has been termed a rat race.
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.
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 and tennis to luncheons at trendy cocktail bars.
One of the most popular depictions of yuppies was found in Bret Easton Ellis' controversial 1991 novel, American Psycho.
Entire city districts have been associated with the yuppie phenomenon; in the 1980s and 1990s, the redeveloped Docklands of London became widely regarded as a (very upmarket) "yuppie slum." Similar accusations have been levelled against expensively renovated areas in a number of other cities around the world.
Related terms
- 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".
- A buppie is sometimes used to refer to a black (African-American) yuppie.
- A guppie is a gay yuppie.
- Yuppify and yuppification are a slang terms used in place of the words gentrify and gentrification but with an even more negative connotation.
- A yuppie slum 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.
- A yuppie food stamp is a crisp US$20 note issued by an ATM machine.
- DINKs are well-off couples who often have much in common with "yuppies". The label is an acronym for Dual Income, No Kids.
- 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.
