Talk:Yuppie/Archive 1

message: In the 1980's I bought a book, and still have it, called "The Yuppie Handbook-The State-of-the Art Manual for Young Urban Professionals" by Marissa Piesman and Marilee Hartley. It would be comedic, except that it describes my younger life pretty well!
Awhile back I heard the term "Muppie" for those of us who have become middle aged.
RE: earlier posts-the original yuppies could not have been the grandchildren of boomers. While it was physically possible for them to be children of boomers, my understanding of the trend at the time was that "yuppie" referred to boomers who weren't into commitment enough to have children.
Karen 20:26, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Published source

message: Stop and think for a minute and you'll realize that the term "yuppie" originally had nothing to do with being "urban"; nor was it about being a "professional," i.e., a practitioner of a profession such as medicine, law, or accounting. This was an abbreviation, not an acronym, and it simply referred to a choice of lifestyle and/or life goals: young, and upwardly-mobile, as in upward in social status and/or income level. It was coined as a wordplay on "yippie" — the latter being politically motivated, and the former, in contrast, being apolitical or political only to the extent that political involvement could affect social standing or income. And, yes, for obvious reasons, it was a pejorative term from the get-go (though the persons it describes would be the last to care about its negative connotations). 
Most of the people to whom it applied were not particularly urban, and not particularly professional, nor was their lack of political committedness particularly relevant to the categorization.
A poll of news stories and op-ed pieces from the late 70s and early 80s will quickly confirm this. 
rowley 04:53, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Young Upwardly-Mobile 

message: The list of common traits seems erroneous and inappropriate from an NPOV standpoint.  It seems that the article would be more encyclopedic in nature if this list was simply removed.  Any thoughts?PsYoP78 16:38, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: NPOV?

message: The term Yuppie started as a demographic term. The three demographic variables employed in the lifestyle label were age, occupation, and geographical density. That is, the term described educated professionals, in their twenties or early thirties, who were moving back into the downtown core of cities. But grafted onto this basic definition are a wide range of psychographic variables including ambitiousness, hard working, materialistic, sophisticated, etc. The problem with these psychographic variables is that they are very difficult to research, infact they are little more than stereotypes and prejudices. Also different people have constructed different psychographic profiles, based on their particular experiences and biases (as is evidenced by the preceding discussion). In popular culture, these stereotypes are what remains of a once legitimate description. mydogategodshat 01:36, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: The many flavours of Yuppies

message: I am concerned about the stereotypes, many of which don't sound at all familiar to me (Yuppies are Republicans?  I thought they were Democrats.)  Of course, I may be wrong, but they are not sourced at all.  See Wikipedia's guidelines on source citation.   Do we have sources for these stereotypes? -Elliotreed 20:45, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sourcing of stereotypes 

message: I think it should be merged here. Wikipedia is not a Wiktionary, and since it's refer to the same reality, they should be merged. We can explain in the beginning of the article that beside the term of "yuppie", the term "DINK" (Double Income No Kids) has also been used. Lapaz 00:20, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Disagree - IMHO - DINKY refers to DUAL income - i.e. a couple. Yuppie as a term refers to single person. Also I think the demographics are different. Also, you can be a DINKY couple, without being a Yuppies. Megapixie 06:31, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

text: Disagree, for the reasons stated by Megapixie. Funnyhat 04:04, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

text: Disagree, for the reasons stated by Megapixie. Ratarsed 19:51, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

text: Disagree, for the reasons stated by Megapixie. Jack Daw 18:35, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge [[DINKY (acronym)]] here 

message: Yuppie, short for "Young Urban Professional," describes a demographic of people primarily comprising the children or grandchildren of the baby boomer generation. Most commonly, they are highly-educated and upwardly-mobile and are aged from early twenties to early-to-mid thirties, circa 2006. Yuppies tend to hold jobs in the professional sectors, with incomes that place them in the upper-middle economic class. The term "Yuppie" emerged in the early 1980s. Although the original yuppies were "young," the term now applies as well to people of middle age.
I think that is a pretty inaccurate, and self-contradicting, set of statements.  The term originated in the early-eighties to describe the new generation of professionals moving into the big U.S. inner-cities that had been on the decline for two decades, but still had some cultural life left.  I think in that original context, large yuppie populations only really existed in NYC, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and Philidelphia.  It was the first reversal of white flight.  The term now is really kind of obsolete, since the yuppie lifestyle has become co-opted as the national standard.  When a person today in suburban Houston is described as a Yuppie because they drive a certain automobile, the term doesn't carry meaning anymore.  It's like trying to defining a hippie without focusing on the late sixties.
:At school in the UK (1980s) I was tought that it meant "young upwardly mobile person". --kingboyk 21:05, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Origins of the term are in slightly different context 

message: I know there was a sources tag in the references section, but I put one up top to remind everybody working on this article that there is no reference material whatsoever.  It's not so much an article as a bunch of people arguing over what they think it means with plentiful IMO's.  And that last paragraph, umm... right...  I'm nominating this for deletion.--Loodog 18:53, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  sources tag 

message: Google showed the term "suppie" as meaning "southern", "suburban" or "senior" urban professional, but not "snobby".  Unless some reference can be cited for this use, it really can't go in. -GTBacchus(talk) 08:11, 28 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Suppie" 

message: The term yuppie did indeed originate in Berkeley, California, a city of 100,000 souls directly across the bay from San Francisco and containing what is generally considered to be the nation's finest public university. The term yippie (youth international party, courtesy Jerry Rubin & Abbie Hoffmann) originated in Berkeley in the midst of its massive, violent demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and the point of changing the one vowel into yuppie (young urban professional, courtesy columnist-turned-nurse Alice Kahn) was to ridicule how the culture of radical politics that defined the city in the 1960s gave way to a culture of precious upper-crust gourmet consumerism in the 1980s. It was in Berkeley that Alice Waters founded Chez Pannise in the early 70s and invented the New American cuisine; she's the reason you can now find goat cheese, balsamic vinegar, and ten different kinds of lettuce at your local Midwestern supermarket, which was certainly not the case in 1980. Surrounding Waters' restaurant in North Berkeley was a variety of shops selling gourmet cheese, bread, chocolate, coffee (Peet's Coffee, owned by the man who opened a cafe in Seattle called Starbucks before selling it and moving south, started in Berkeley in the mid-70s) as well as books, homemade crafts, and studios offering meditation and yoga (again, now these are ubiquitous, but not then); this neighborhood became known as the Gourmet Ghetto, and was seen as the symbol of how the revolution was co-opted. These businesses sold themselves as being a part of the idealistic leftist culture--the Cheese Board, for example, is one of the country's oldest cooperatively run retail stores--and helped turn all these former hippies, now flush with cash due to their jobs in the dawn of the tech era (many Berkeley residents made the 40-minute commute to their desks in Silicon Valley--usually in a Honda Civic adorned with a Greenpeace bumper sticker, radio set on KPFA or KQED) into a class of narcissistic lifestyle fetishists who convinced themselves that they were continuing the activism of their youth and embodying back-to-the-land values by spending huge amounts of their time and discretionary income waiting in line at the Cheese Board for fresh baguettes (when they weren't going to Grateful Dead concerts and No-Nuke rallies, that is.) In other words: the original yuppies were liberal Democrats, financed by the tech boom of the early 80s and designed to give former hippies and activists a way to join the mainstream while maintaining a unique identity; the yuppie Republican trend was a late 90s phenomenon, in sync with Wall Street's irrational exuberance, and was intended to make those twentysomething MBAs feel as hip as their friends in the bands they would go out to see on the weekends (you can still occasionally spot them; he's that goateed and t-shirted guy reading Atlas Shrugged while sipping espresso in a Williamsburg cafe.) The yuppie should also not be confused with the habits of liberal Jews on New York's Upper West Side (go to a foreign or independent art-house film on Saturday night, wake up the next morning to the bagels-and-lox-and-newspaper ritual), which is related but has different cultural origins. A better modern example of yuppie infestation can be found in Brooklyn's Park Slope, though they would all self-righteously deny it, of course, while on their way to enroll their kid at a private school, after which they'll go out for some Thai... 207.38.181.12 20:19, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Great, cite some sources for that, trim it down, and we have an article.--Loodog 05:00, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Origin of Yuppies in Berkeley (or: a short history of scum) 

message: Due to Loodog's proposed deletion, a few of us have stepped up to rewrite the article to conform to Wikipedia's quality standards. If you have previously contributed to this article, you are welcome to do so again; however, please do not be surprised if your contributions are reshuffled to form a more comprehensive and encyclopedic article. Please also ensure that the sources of your new contributions are properly cited. Adraeus 07:49, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: The Great Rewrite

message: I had always thought it was Young Upwardly-mobile Professional Person.  It would still only be "Yupp". Rich Farmbrough, 08:42 28  April 2007 (GMT).
:Both "urban" and "upwardly mobile" were presumed derivations of the acronym as far back as the early 1980s. I think "yumpies" just didn't flow off the tongue. --Dhartung | Talk 04:02, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Pseudo acronym

message: Do we need a "Yuppies in popular culture" section? I mean, really? And would anyone be upset if I nuked it in its entirety? Lewis Collard 16:00, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: If William Wallace can have a popular-culture section, I think we can have a popular-culture section, too. Adraeus 22:52, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Haven't you ever been told "well, if everyone jumped off a cliff..."? ;) Lewis Collard 23:23, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm envisioning this article's popular culture section as more than a list. The article's still in development. Don't delete content that can be later spliced to create something more comprehensive. Adraeus 01:40, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Mmmkay. Lewis Collard 01:45, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It's a cultural phenomenon, so it must stay.--141.241.29.187 16:36, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

text: I think the movie examples make it easier to understand what a yuppie is. I had a vague idea, but when I saw Fight Club referenced I knew I had it right. Maybe it can be removed later though if the article expands. Maybe a picture of an "archetypical" yuppie would add to it too. --Cyhawk 20:53, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, I've changed my position on the above. I feared it might turn into "here's this film, I reckon it depicts yuppies pretty good" or "so this guy mentioned the word Yuppie in this song one time". It contains cultural depictions that third-party sources explicitly call depictions of yuppiedom. So I no longer think nuking it is a good idea, as long as it's kept to this standard. Lewis Collard! (baby i'm bad news) 11:15, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Popular culture" section 

message: I replaced "American values" by "family values", since being a yuppie is not specific to the US; the word is also actually in use in other English speaking countries like the UK Actually, "Family values" might still be not the perfect term, since it's not just about the family; so please feel free to edit further. Kuteni 19:16, 5 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I've gone one better: I've removed the bit about "American/family values" altogether; "American values" was backed up by a source, "family values" may have been more accurate, but it was not backed up by anything. Lewis Collard! (baby i'm bad news) 21:58, 5 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  American values? 

message: The top line of the article says that the typical Yuppie is upper middle class. I understand that this may have been written by an American - America and Britain have different definitions of Middle Class. My understanding is the US definition revolves much more around money than it does in the UK. The British definition involves your upbringing, your school, how you speak, your views and so on.
According to the British definition, most Yuppies would not have middle class backgrounds, and certainly not upper-middle class ones. When used pejoratively, the term Yuppie implies a spiv on the make. Can I suggest that opening definition of Yuppie stick to descriptions of their financial status, rather than their class in the broader sense? User:philipdw 17.20 28/11/2009
:Your point about the difference between British and American definitions of middle class is well-taken.
:That said, we're confronted here with a neologism, with all the problems entailing. Before even approaching differences between cultural regions, there's the pressing problem of whether the word ever had a prevalent fixed meaning. Stereotypes about yuppies, as the article suggests, are culturally loaded, such that a group seen as yuppies by another group may not acknowledge themselves as such.
:Some cultures enjoy debating what a term means. That is to say, for some words, there is no established definition because rival cultures intentionally treat a word's meaning as a battleground. To take an example, the relation between the terms "African American", "black", "negro", and "colored", these are not only disputed, not only regional, but constantly in flux. These transitory, political defintions are unsuited for an encyclopedia, except to note in passing that they are not fixed. I'm unsure where to go from there vis-a-vis "middle class" and "yuppie". With Regards, Piano non troppo (talk) 19:03, 26 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Upper Middle class? 

message: Although the two subcultures share several characteristics in common (young, white, urban) in general, yuppies refer to those making alot of money and usually involved in the business world. Hipsters are generally portrayed as involved in the arts and openly derisive towards yuppies. They're more in competiton than synonymous.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.13.140.96 (talk) 18:48, 26 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed from 'Hipsters' category