Do People Still Say “Yuppie”?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, it’s Mark.

Hey, Mark, where are you calling from?

I’m in the Madison, Wisconsin area.

Welcome to the show, Mark. What can we do for you?

Oh, we were going to talk about yuppies today.

I was talking with a guy that I work with, and he’s about in his early 30s, and he was telling me they just bought a new house, and they bought two new cars, and he’s going back to school for his master’s, and his wife has a good job.

And so I said, oh, you’re yuppies then.

And he looked at me like, what’s a yelpie?

Oh, he really didn’t know the term?

No.

Interesting.

I work for kind of a high-end restaurant on the weekends. It’s where I know him from.

And it’s an older crowd because it’s a pretty high-volume, pretty intense place.

And for a restaurant, it’s older people, 30s and 40s for restaurants.

But I started asking around other people, maybe about a dozen people.

And only one other person knew what a yuppie was.

Isn’t that interesting?

Nobody knows what a yuppie is in this next generation, previous generation.

So people in their 30s and 40s don’t use, as far as you know, the term yuppie.

Right.

He did not know.

This one guy, he was probably 40-ish, and he said, yeah, my mom and dad used to talk about yuppies.

I really don’t know what it is, but I’ve heard of it.

It has fallen out of favor.

If you look at, there’s a website called Google Ingrams, which is more or less reliable for some things, but it tracks the use of words and phrases in books.

So it’s a very select group of texts.

But for this purpose, it works.

And it shows that Yuppie peaked around 1990.

And the use of the term has been on decline ever since.

So that’s around 30 years.

Yeah, because I lived in the Chicago area about in the late 80s, early 90s.

I remember, especially in the late 80s, it was yuppie everything, you know, yuppie townhouses and yuppie cars, BMWs, and yuppie food, Haagen-Dazs.

And you were a yuppie if you had one of the Motorola brick cell phones or if you had one of the car phones installed in your cars with a real squiggly antenna.

You were really something then.

That’s interesting because Yuppie first appeared in Chicago Magazine in 1980, as far as I know.

Huh, that’s interesting.

Yeah, but it quickly spread to the whole rest of the country because it really kind of put this idea in place of these young urban professionals who had two incomes and had this demonstrative way of showing off their incomes.

I thought it was kind of interesting, too, that it came and went so fast, like I was trying to relate it to hippies, which predates yuppie by a long time.

And I still meet people in their 20s today that still relate to being hippies.

And that kind of stuck around.

Yeah, hippie is older.

It appeared around 1948, and it had to peak around 1970 and really dropped in use by 1983.

But then around 20 years later in 2013, it had another peak, although it has been, again, declining ever since.

But hippie has had this kind of second wind, the second life.

But language is like fashion and jokes and contagious diseases.

It has the same kind of lifespan as anything that humans pass around on their social networks.

It goes in and out of fashion.

Well, Mark, thank you for musing with us on the lifespan of these words, yuppie and hippie.

This has been a real interesting thing to think about.

But, yeah, they definitely have a birth and a slow decline into oblivion.

Most language just doesn’t persist.

All right.

Well, take care of yourself.

Good luck in the restaurant business.

Thanks.

All right.

Take care.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Do you still use the word yuppie or do you use a different word to describe the kind of person that Mark’s talking about?

Let us know, 877-929-9673.