Yuppie

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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, 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 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 yuppies in a speech.

1 The yuppie stereotype
2 Related terms
3 See also
4 References

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The yuppie stereotype

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 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" in that they buy expensive things merely for the sake of buying expensive things. An example would be the "yuppie" stereotype for those with a love for microbrewed and imported beer. 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. Many of these yuppies are said to be "credit posers" and undertake a large amount of debt to maintain their outward image. To an extent, some of them essentially live "paycheck-to-paycheck" -- the paychecks are simply 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.

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 better-known and more notorious depictions of yuppies was found in Bret Easton Ellis' controversial 1991 novel, American Psycho, which satirically lambasted the values of yuppies with a hyper-materialistic, murderously self-absorbed protagonist.

Yuppies tend to be associated with city or suburban dwellers. The term is commonly used by traditional country 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, the redeveloped Docklands of London became widely regarded as a (very upmarket) "yuppie slum"; San Francisco's formerly working-class Noe Valley neighborhood is similarly afflicted with yuppie-ism, not to mention Houston's Midtown 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 areas - usually low-rent communities - in a number of other cities around the world.

Yuppies are sometimes stereotyped as wearing white shirts, blue ties, and black pants.

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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".
Yippie is sometimes used to refer to a person with hippie values and attire but with yuppie consumer habits.
Buppie or Nuppie is sometimes used to refer to an African-American yuppie. This usually denotes a lack of association with larger African-American culture in favor of corporate or materialistic values.
Guppie is a gay yuppie. As with Buppie, this usually denotes a lack of association with a subculture.
Yuppify and yuppification are a slang terms used in place of the words gentrify and gentrification but with even more 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.
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
A variation, yuffie, is a young-urban-failure, or more generally a failed yuppie.
Boughie (pronounced Bōō-jee—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.