Yuppie (short for "young urban professional" or "young upwardly-mobile professional")

Yuppie n. Informal A young city or suburban resident with a well-paid professional job and an affluent lifestyle.


"Of course, that term, yuppie, has fallen so out of favor that we’re not even supposed to use it anymore. We’re expected to come up with a neologism—a clever 21st-century inversion of the word. But we’re not going to do that, because we don’t need to: The yuppie of 1986 and the yuppie of 2006 are so similar as to be indistinguishable. A used copy of The Yuppie Handbook recently fell into my hands. The book was published in 1984 as a jokey piece of social anthropology, and it made a slew of observations about this new American species. The yuppie’s bizarre lifestyle preferences were intended to elicit populist guffaws. Here are some of the things, according to The Yuppie Handbook, that the budding yupster could not live without: gourmet coffee, a Burberry trench coat, expensive running shoes, a Cuisinart, a renovated kitchen with a double sink, smoked mozzarella from Dean & DeLuca, a housekeeper, a mortgage, a Coach bag, a Gucci briefcase, and a Rolex. Oh, har har har, that crazy yup! [...] All of which means that the archetypal yuppie of the eighties sounds precisely like, um, everyone you know. Trust me: There is not a single sentence in The Yuppie Handbook that could make you chuckle. By now, the entire manuscript comes across as nothing more than a rote annotation of urbane American life. “When people were denouncing yuppies, they had considerably lower incomes than yuppies, so the things yuppies spent their money on seemed frivolous and unnecessary from their vantage point,” says Cornell University economist Robert H. Frank, author of Luxury Fever. “What most people fail to anticipate is that your sense of what you need and want is very elastic. When your income rises, your consumption standard gradually adapts.”
(http://www.details.com/culture-trends/critical-eye/200611/the-return-of-the-yuppie)


Of course this all comes about yesterday while I'm wearing my Prada sunglasses, contemplating my Juicy Couture eyeglasses (and if only they came in white), but they don't, so I need to buy this pair of Dolce and Gabbana ones instead. And I realized, between that, my old Coach purse, my Dooney and Burke purse and keyring, my DKNY/Bulgari/Burberry (among many others) perfumes that I had become a yuppie. It doesn't help that I carry around my Starbucks tumbler everywhere. 


And it's not even that I make that much money. Sure I make more money then almost everyone down here, but not by much. And it certainly helps that my rent is DIRT CHEAP. 





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