The word yuppie took off thanks to a former yippie radical
Jerry Rubin had once been a radical leader among the yippies, as members of the Youth International Party were known. By 1982 he was running a business networking club that met at Studio 54 to soft classical music. A columnist overheard people joking that Rubin had gone from yippie to yuppie, and the label spread across America.
Yuppie stands for young urban professional, or young upwardly mobile professional. Its first known printing came in a May 1980 Chicago magazine piece by Dan Rottenberg, who later said he had not coined it but picked it up from others and saw it as a neutral description. Even so, his article flagged how this new inner-city crowd might push out poorer residents.
Bob Greene's March 1983 column about Rubin's group, headlined From Yippie to Yuppie, gave the word national reach, and Alice Kahn's satire in the East Bay Express that June pushed it further. The Yuppie Handbook, a spoof of The Official Preppy Handbook, appeared early that year. When Gary Hart ran for president in 1984, commentators called him the yuppie candidate, using the term for socially liberal, fiscally conservative voters, and Newsweek named 1984 the Year of the Yuppie while admitting the group was hard to pin down. A rival acronym, yumpie, never caught on.
Resentment built quickly. By 1985 the Wall Street Journal was reporting a backlash from people who fit the profile but hated being lumped in with it; one researcher described yuppies as a class that delayed children to keep up the payments on a Saab. After the 1987 stock market crash the word lost its political sense and turned plainly insulting. MTV held a Foreclosure on a Yuppie contest in 1989, and Time ran a mock obituary for the yuppie on April 8, 1991. In Britain, the word thrived during the Thatcher years and spawned spin-offs such as yuppification and yuppie-bashing.
It kept coming back. In 2000 David Brooks dubbed Benjamin Franklin the Founding Yuppie. On screen, the type runs from Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen in Wall Street (1987) to Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (2000).
Source: Yuppie
