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Yuppie
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Posted by: forwardone
Marketing Terms > yuppie yuppieTerm derived from young, urban professional, a designation that came into vogue in the 1980s. The yuppie population consists of that group of people in their thirties whose lifestyles are upwardly mobile and who represent a target audience for some advertisers, such as BMW automobiles or Fila sportswear. The term has come to have a somewhat pejorative connotation, particularly when applied to a specific individual.
Business Terms > yuppie
YuppieAcronym for young urban professional. The term was popularized during the 1980s to describe young career people having relatively high incomes and education, seeking instant success and gratification, often beyond their financial means.
American Word Origins > yuppie
yuppie
Origin: 1984
Thanks to a book by two of their kind, yuppies burst on the American scene early in 1984. In an article that year titled "Here Come the Yuppies!" Time inquired, "Who are all those upwardly mobile folk with designer water, running shoes, picked parquet floors and $450,000 condos in semislum buildings? Yuppies, of course, for Young Urban [or Upwardly-Mobile] Professionals, and the one true guide to their carefully hectic life-style is The Yuppie Handbook.... Tongue firmly in chic, Authors Marissa Piesman and Marilee Hartley tirelessly chronicle the ways of the Yuppie, along with its less-known subspecies the Guppie (Gay Urban Professional) and Puppie (Pregnant Urban Professional)."
George Orwell had predicted the ruthless dictatorship of Big Brother in his novel 1984, but the figure of satire in America that year was someone entirely different. The yuppie was a person in young adulthood, living in or near a city, ambitious, successful, materialistic, and self-indulgent. Reducing ponderous terminology to its initials and adding a diminutive suffix, the authors of The Yuppie Handbook not only named the target of their satire but also identified that target as a whole new demographic group for advertisers and politicians to pursue.
With the suffix -ie, yuppie followed the pattern of other two-syllable words describing types of young people: preppie, hippie, and yippie. Preppie (1962) was a half-derisive, half-affectionate term for someone who attended a private college-preparatory school or who dressed and acted like the stereo-typically rich and success-bound prep-school student. Hippie (1965) identified a whole counterculture. Yippie (1968) came from the name of an irreverent, politically radical group of hippies, the Youth International Party.
Once yuppie was coined, other initialisms followed: buppie (1986) identified a black yuppie, suppie (1987) a Southern one, yuca (1988) a Cuban-American (with a play on the name of the yucca plant). There was even skippie (1987), a school kid with income and purchasing power. And there was the yuppie disease (1986), a.k.a. chronic fatigue syndrome (1981).