There’s a New Yorker article out now that says that the term was first in print in 1980. Though the author did claim to have heard before that, in Chicago, but it is presented as, that’s the general birth time of the term.
But I swear we used it in the late 60’s in Texas. Now, I haven’t looked it up and my memory is terrible these days so I’m not rejecting his claim outright but danged if I don’t remember it from earlier.
When do remember first hearing the term?
Are you perhaps thinking of the term “yippie” which does date back to the 1960s?
And to answer your specific question, I first heard in the early 1980s.
Well, the reason I think I remember it is because my hick cousins used to call them guppies - gay yuppies. Not that they were but, hey, they (my cousins) were from east Texas. Their homophobia aside, the late 60s was when I spent time with them and guppie was a take off of yuppie - not yippie.
Be that as it may, I am completely prepared to be proven wrong. It’s just my memory of it.
FWIW, the earliest quotation in the OED is from 1980. That source (Chicago Magazine) mentions the term and also defines it, indicating that it wasn’t in very common use then.
I first heard it in 1983, when my new husband and I bought a Volvo only because I’d researched cars and concluded it was the safest vehicle we could buy, and his recently assumed job as an attorney meant that we could (barely) afford it. I was horrified to find out that I had qualified us as “yuppies,” a concept I found quite distasteful.
Worse yet, we became fans of the then-brand-new Silver Palate cookbooks, happily making our own fresh pasta and seeking out best-quality olive oil. Which of course is what all the yuppies were doing then.
Being branded a “yuppie” hurt, because I thought of myself as a free-spirited progressive. In retrospect, though … well, if the shoe fits, wear the damn thing.
Seem to recall from my university days in the early 1980s a sociology lecturer railing and wailing about yuppies and dinks who were buggering up the local real estate market, likely because they were crimping his chances of making a killing there.
Only if they are Birkenstocks.
Which would have put it at about 1982 for me.
Guppy is something of a pejorative in its own right. Being a stupid, decorative, and otherwise useless fish. That has been around at least since the ‘80s here, and likely a lot longer.
I remember we used to term freshmen in their roving packs as guppies. And singular applied to anyone showing the intelligence of a fish in a bowl.
The entire concept of yuppy didn’t really work before the 80’s as the basic demographic wasn’t that prevalent before. Not in numbers enough to attract interest. Interest shown by market droids is of a good indication of a segments profile. That was definitely an 80’s thing.
First time I encountered the word was in 2004 when reading the book Simplify Your Life by Elaine St James
I first heard yuppy in the early 80’s at university. It was more about the look than anything else. It was Izod polo shirts with the collar flipped up, sweater draped around the shoulders, and deck shoes with no socks.
The first two citations in Trove [the Australian newspaper archive] were from early 1984, both helpfully having the acronym spelled out in parentheses, so presumably pretty fresh.
One of these is from Tharunka, the student newspaper from the University of New South Wales, where I presume the likes of @penultima_thule and @Francis_Vaughan were busy trying to smash the very foundations of young urban professionalism, while we still had free[ish] tertiary education.
I first heard it in my freshman year of college in 1978/80. Terms like yuppie, ozone layer and government cheese were part of defining that time for me. That and Ronald Reagan and the band U2. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Halcyon days, substantially thanks to Gough … which should have been more appreciated at the time.
I first heard it in the early 1980s.
Google Ngram doesn’t show any usage of “yuppie” prior to 1980. However, it does show a couple of blips on the graph for “yuppy”, one around 1900, another around 1927, and a bunch between about 1935 and 1955.
Searching on google books, I found cowboy song references like “singing hi, yi, yuppy yuppy yea” and a 1945 reference from Iowa where “the game Yuppy was played” (and apparently a delicious lunch was served…).
I have no idea what the game Yuppy is, and a google search was completely flooded with modern references and therefore wasn’t helpful. It’s definitely something I’ve never heard of.
I have to wonder if the 1960 use referenced by the OP is more of a cowboy reference and not a “Young Urban Professional” reference. It wouldn’t be the first time that two completely different paths led to the same word with two different meanings.
Does your terrible memory recall it as being used to mean the same thing? Or maybe something different?
I think i first heard it in the early 80s.
That’s preppies, and i remember hearing about them in the late 70s. My college roommate was one, and i had the book and everything.
preppies grew up to be yuppies when they moved out of their parents house with their business degree and went to work for Dad’s advertising firm.
You’re thinking of preppies, not yuppies, as posters above have already noted. A Venn diagram would show a lot of overlap, but preppies were around long before yuppies were a thing.
“The Preppy Handbook” came out in 1980, if Amazon is to be believed, but by that time was simply documenting a well-established phenomenon.
This.
We had preppies in my So Cal public high school in the early 1970s. “Prep” of course coming from “preparatory school”, meaning posh private high school.
While the preppies attended college the term stuck to them.
As soon as they got out of college, they morphed into yuppies. “Young upwardly mobile urban professionals”. Which was early 1980s.
[Moderating]
Since this is asking for personal experiences, it should be in IMHO, not FQ. Moving.