Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Being a Yuppie

"Yuppie, an acronym for 'Young Upwardly Mobile Professional Person,' was coined by the advertising industry to describe a demographic of people, primarily composed of 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.
Syndicated newspaper columnist
Bob Greene is generally credited with having stolen the term "Yuppie" in one of his columns in the early 1980s, plagiarizing Alice Kahn who famously wrote about them in the East Bay Express in 1982, but the first known citation of the word is in a May 13, 1981 article titled "Chicago: City on the brink" by R. C. Longworth in the Chicago Tribune.
The term is often used
pejoratively, with an emphasis on the connotations of "yuppies" as selfish and superficial. In the novel A Very British Coup, the Prime Minister Harry Perkins comments on the greed of yuppies in a speech. In the US, yuppie is frequently used in to describe anything which would appeal to American upper-middle class taste, including cars, supermarkets, and styles of decor.
The term "yuppies" has come to refer to more than just a demographic profile - it is also a psychographic and geographic profile. It describes a set of behavioral and psychographic attributes that have come to constitute a commonly believed stereotype.
According to the stereotype, yuppies are more
conservative than the hippies who preceded them. (In reality, many of the early yuppies were actually hippies in the 1960s.) Dispensing with the social causes of the hippies (who themselves shed traditional values), yuppies tend to be "work hard / play hard" types. A cinematic example is Charlie Sheen's character; Bud Fox, in the movie Wall Street.
Yuppies tend to value material goods (especially trendy new things) and are also supposed to have "bad taste" in that they buy expensive things merely for the sake of buying expensive things. An example would be the "yuppie" stereotype for those with a love for Starbucks coffee. In particular this can apply to their
stocks, luxury automobiles (e.g. BMW, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz), sport utility vehicles, development houses, and technological gadgets, particularly cell phones, laptops, and PDAs. See Conspicuous consumption.
The yuppies' fast-paced pursuit of material goods can have unintended consequences. Usually in a hurry, yuppies rely heavily on exorbitantly-priced convenience goods and services, such as the occasionally ridiculed usage of the coffee house franchise
Starbucks. Many of these yuppies are said to be "credit posers" and undertake a large amount of debt to maintain their outward image. To an extent, some of them essentially live "paycheck-to-paycheck" -- the paychecks are simply larger.
Heavily influenced by a
competitive corporate environment, yuppies often value those behaviors that they have found useful in gaining upward mobility and hence income and status. They often take their corporate values home to their spouses and children. Being "time poor," their family relations can become difficult to sustain. Ironically, their dense calendars are often mirrored and exacerbated by their children's, with every moment scheduled to fulfill athletic, artistic, and social obligations. Maintaining this way of life can be mentally exhausting. They frequently move every few years to follow their job, further straining their family. This fast-paced lifestyle has been termed a rat race.
According to the stereotype, there is a certain air of informality about them, yet an entire code of unwritten etiquette can govern their activities from
golf, tennis and Lacrosse to luncheons at trendy cocktail bars. Older Yuppies tend to side more with the Republicans and Conservatives, while younger Yuppies are generally more "involved" with social causes and tend to be more politically correct, more often siding with the Democrats and Liberals.
One of the better-known and more notorious depictions of yuppies was found in
Bret Easton Ellis' controversial 1991 novel, American Psycho, which satirically lambasted the values of yuppies with a hyper-materialistic, murderously self-absorbed protagonist.
Yuppies tend to be associated with city or
suburban dwellers. The term is commonly used by traditional country folk and good ol' boys in reference to people who live the stereotypical urban or suburban lifestyle. Entire city districts have been associated with the yuppie phenomenon; in the 1980s and 1990s, the redeveloped Docklands of London became widely regarded as a (very upmarket) "yuppie slum"; San Francisco's formerly working-class Noe Valley neighborhood is similarly afflicted with yuppie-ism, not to mention Houston's Midtown, Boston's South End, and Galleria districts (Houston's Midtown was once dominated by Vietnamese-run businesses until lofts were built in the mid-1990s). Similar accusations have been levelled against expensively renovated areas - usually low-rent communities - in a number of other cities around the world." (in Wikipedia).
Estas são, alegadamente, a definição e características de um yuppie.
É TUDO FALSO!
Ser yuppie é a melhor qualidade passível de ser atribuída a um ser humano.
Se não concordam é porque não o são e nunca poderiam, em caso algum, chegar a sê-lo.
Aguardem o nosso manifesto!