Yuppie
|
|
"Yuppie," short for "Young Urban Professional," describes a demographic of people generally between 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 1980s as an echo of the earlier "hippies" and "yippies" who had rejected the materialistically-oriented values of the business community.
Syndicated newspaper columnist Bob Greene is generally credited having coined the term "Yuppie" in one of his columns in the early 1980s.
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 this stereotype, yuppies are more conservative than the preceding hippie generation. Dispensing of the social causes of their more passionate parents (who themselves shed traditional values), yuppies tend to be 9-5 professional workers. 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 being 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 fast-paced pursuit of these 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.
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 an 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 in a connotation of becoming like or catering to the Yuppie.
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--Dual Income, No Kids.
"Sitcoms" are former yuppies or Dinks. The label is an acronym for Single Income Two Children Oppresive Mortgage.
"yuppicide" killing of Yuppies. (Vehicular Yuppicide is when you slam into a Volvo.) A New York based hardcore/punk band in the 1990s Yuppicide.