Of all the family-newspaper-appropriate socioeconomic slurs, one that was ubiquitous in the 1980s and ’90s is slowly on its way out in this millennium: yuppie.
This moderately derogatory term for young urban professionals, or young upwardly mobile professionals (given more kick with the addendum of “scum”), is believed to have first appeared in print in a 1980 Chicago magazine article by Dan Rottenberg, though he does not take credit for coining it. A Google Ngram search reveals that the word’s usage in books began ascending steeply in 1983 and reached its apex a decade later.
It’s no surprise that the yuppie flourished after the gloomy ’70s had yielded to easy money in the stock market (until 1987, at least) for postcollegiate brokers and boomers eager to invest after their youthful fling with the counterculture. Television and movies amply reflected the proliferating demographic. The yuppie apotheosis on the small screen was “Thirtysomething” and “Seinfeld”; in the multiplex, there were too many to mention, but “The Big Chill” and “When Harry Met Sally” would be a good start, and, on the darker side, Michael Douglas’s 1987 filmography (“Wall Street” and “Fatal Attraction”).
We have plenty of equivalents today, such as “This Is 40” (and nearly every other romantic comedy) and TV’s “Togetherness” and the recently departed “Parenthood” and “How I Met Your Mother” (and most other dramedies and sitcoms). Their organic-buying, gym-going, homeowning characters, however, aren’t tagged as yuppies as readily as those from the previous era were. It’s not because they aren’t from the narcissistic upper middle class; they certainly are. But they look different now.
The yuppie has shifted from standing on the prow of his yacht in an attitude of rapaciously aspirational entitlement to a defensive crouch of financial and existential insecurity. This instability has fragmented the yuppie’s previously coherent identity into a number of personae, each of which can trace its lineage to its ’80s paterfamilias.
Collectively, these microyuppies are just as strong in their ranks as their progenitors, if not more so. Three decades ago, the yuppie was viewed as a self-interested alien invader in an America that had experienced a solid 20 years of radical activism and meaningful progress in civil rights and women’s liberation. A generation and a half later, we have so deeply internalized the values of the yuppie that we have ceased to notice when one is in our midst — or when we have become one ourselves.
This moderately derogatory term for young urban professionals, or young upwardly mobile professionals (given more kick with the addendum of “scum”), is believed to have first appeared in print in a 1980 Chicago magazine article by Dan Rottenberg, though he does not take credit for coining it. A Google Ngram search reveals that the word’s usage in books began ascending steeply in 1983 and reached its apex a decade later.It’s no surprise that the yuppie flourished after the gloomy ’70s had yielded to easy money in the stock market (until 1987, at least) for postcollegiate brokers and boomers eager to invest after their youthful fling with the counterculture. Television and movies amply reflected the proliferating demographic. The yuppie apotheosis on the small screen was “Thirtysomething” and “Seinfeld”; in the multiplex, there were too many to mention, but “The Big Chill” and “When Harry Met Sally” would be a good start, and, on the darker side, Michael Douglas’s 1987 filmography (“Wall Street” and “Fatal Attraction”).
We have plenty of equivalents today, such as “This Is 40” (and nearly every other romantic comedy) and TV’s “Togetherness” and the recently departed “Parenthood” and “How I Met Your Mother” (and most other dramedies and sitcoms). Their organic-buying, gym-going, homeowning characters, however, aren’t tagged as yuppies as readily as those from the previous era were. It’s not because they aren’t from the narcissistic upper middle class; they certainly are. But they look different now.
The yuppie has shifted from standing on the prow of his yacht in an attitude of rapaciously aspirational entitlement to a defensive crouch of financial and existential insecurity. This instability has fragmented the yuppie’s previously coherent identity into a number of personae, each of which can trace its lineage to its ’80s paterfamilias.
Collectively, these microyuppies are just as strong in their ranks as their progenitors, if not more so. Three decades ago, the yuppie was viewed as a self-interested alien invader in an America that had experienced a solid 20 years of radical activism and meaningful progress in civil rights and women’s liberation. A generation and a half later, we have so deeply internalized the values of the yuppie that we have ceased to notice when one is in our midst — or when we have become one ourselves.
by Teddy Wayne, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tiffany Ford
