Yuppie

"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.

Related Topics:
Demographic - Baby boomer - Profession - Sector - Hippies - Yippies

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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 5/13/1981 article ?Chicago: City on the brink? by R. C. Longworth in the Chicago Tribune.

Related Topics:
Bob Greene - 1980s - Chicago Tribune

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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.

Related Topics:
Pejoratively - A Very British Coup - Thatcherite

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