YUPPIE

noun and adjective Also written Yuppie or yuppy (People and Society) noun: A young urban (or upwardly mobile) professional; a humorous name for a member of a socio-economic group made up of professional people working in cities. adjective: Of or characteristic of a yuppie or yuppies in general; of a kind that would appeal to a yuppie. Etymology: Formed from the initial letters of Young Urban Professional (or Young Upwardly mobile Professional) and the suffix -ie. History and Usage: Yuppie was probably the most important buzzword of the mid eighties, an extraordinarily successful coinage which somehow succeeded in summing up a whole social group, its lifestyle and aspirations, in a single word. In an article on the writer John Irving in 1982, the American critic Joseph Epstein described them as People who are undecided about growing up: they are college-educated, getting on and even getting up in the world, but with a bit of the hippie-dippie counterculture clinging to them still--yuppies, they have been called, the YUP standing for young urban professionals. At first (in 1982-4) yuppie competed with the form yumpie (which included the m of upwardly-mobile), but this form was perhaps too close to the verb yomp, with its military route-march associations, to succeed. A measure of the popularity of yuppie was the speed with which it generated derivatives: the nouns yuppiedom, yuppieism, and yuppi(e)ness all appeared within two years of the coinage of yuppie, closely followed by the adjective yuppyish. By the middle of the decade there was also an awareness of the way in which yuppie culture pervaded and changed its surroundings, a process known as yuppification (with an associated verb, yuppify, and adjective yuppified). Perhaps more telling even than the derivatives were all the variations on the theme of yuppie that journalists turned out in the second half of the decade, including yuffie (young urban failure), yummie (young upwardly-mobile mommy), and those listed under buppie, guppie, woopie, and yappie. The second half of the eighties saw the rise in popularity of New Age culture and of a more environmentally aware lifestyle which made the yuppie approach seem already a little outdated, but it was by then so familiar that it could safely be abbreviated to yup without fear of misunderstanding. Even the abbreviated form acquired derivatives: the language of yups was Yuppese or Yupspeak, a young female yup was a yuppette (compare hackette), their preferred type of car was a yupmobile, and so on. Yuppies have come in for some revisionist thinking lately. The yup backlash is such that many people will no longer speak the 'Y word' and others are spurning pesto for pot pies. Adweek 17 June 1985 Who are the yuppies? Gee acknowledges that young urban professionals 'who once thought nothing of jumping in the old Bimmer [BMW] and heading down to the local gourmet grocer for some Brie' are keeping a lower profile, fearing they may be called 'too yup'. Los Angeles Times 5 May 1986, section 4, p. 2 Their 'bashers' (shacks) will be forcibly removed by police to make way for developers who want to 'yuppify' the Charing Cross area. Observer 16 Aug. 1987, p. 3 What Dickens is describing, I suddenly realised, is yuppification. The trendies were moving in. Independent 17 Sept. 1987, p. 18 'The yupskies are coming!' said Mr Baker...in Leningrad yesterday after being impressed by the new breed of young upwardly-mobile Soviet entrepreneurs. Daily Telegraph 8 Oct. 1988, p. 32 There is a risk of forced selling breaking out in the yuppier sections of London's housing market. Arena Autumn/Winter 1988, p. 99 Married yuppette Kathy is knee deep into her affair with...Tom. Independent 16 May 1989, p. 29 How will the eighties be labelled? The Yuppie decade? The Thatcher miracle/disaster? The years when pop and rock got a conscience? The dawning of the breakdown of communism? Guardian 22 Nov. 1989, p. 43 You didn't think yuppies liked poetry. Don't be vulgar and simplistic, dear Val. Antonia Byatt Possession (1990), p. 417 These sound like thoroughly well-organised chaps who would take to the executive life like yuppies to bottles of Perrier water. Punch 20 Apr. 1990, p. 9