Yuppie Research Paper

Drew Lugar
Josey’s Class on Word Origins
Assignment: Definition and origin of “Yuppie”
What is a yuppie today? A yuppie by definition is a young, well-paid, middle class professional who works in or near a large city with a luxurious lifestyle. This word is often used to describe “city people” and is generally directed as an insult. People referred to as yuppies are seen to only care about money and vanity. They are often described as obsessing over physical fitness, diet, and “makin’ bank.” Nowadays, there are really two forms of yuppies. According to urban dictionary, a yuppie is an arrogant person with a focus on high quality materialistic items, such as high fashion and name brands. They are said to be of the thought that they are better than everyone else and look down upon others with less money. Many people describe “yuppies” as obsessive with money and entitled. This entitlement comes out personality-wise as arrogance, superiority, and egotistical. Yuppies by this definition are also referred to as narcissists. Nowadays, it refers to city folk and is used by “country people” as an insult. Similar to “Nance,” yuppie describes a person from the city that does not or cannot live in the country/hills, or does not understand nature. For example, people from rural USA
that enjoy fishing would refer to someone as a yuppie or Nance that squirms at bating a hook or touching a fish. While Nance is directed as an insult more so to men, as it is short for Nancy, yuppie describes an entire genderless population. This was often seen in the television show Duck Dynasty. In that show, Phil Robertson often called people or groups of people yuppies. In that sense, he was referring to “city folk” that have adapted to urban lifestyle that could not survive in the wild/country.
Origin of the word Yuppie The word yuppie originates back to the early 1980’s.
The term was allegedly coined by Joseph Epstein in 1980, although there is doubt that he was the first to use the term, more or less the first to put it in print. Originally the word began as an acronym for Young Urban Professional or Young Upwardly-mobile Professional. In the early days, this term was used to describe young, business folk that used and bragged about their cellular telephones. As the term evolved, this population the term was describing evolved to the current usage previously mentioned. Since the origination of the term, many words have been developed encompassing the term and its meaning, such as yuppification and
yuppify. Other terms have also been developed to be more hateful and to narrow the focus of the insult. Buppie was developed to differentiate young black urban professionals. Guppie was for young gay professionals, and a huppie is a Hispanic urban professional. Finally a puppie is a poor urban professional that is describes as lazy and cheap, that still feels entitled to everything. Puppies are said to be people on welfare that have the ability to work, but chose not to because of the free money they receive.

In the famous fictional words of Forest Gump, “that’s all I gotta say about that. “
If there are any concerns with the length of this manuscript, you can go fuck yourself because I literally just wrote a paper on the word yuppie.