The Devil's Encyclopedia: Y
Yuppie
Yuppie is an American slang term short for "young, upwardly-mobile professional." The scope of the term is largely limited to American society, but not necessarily to those of American birth. The prototype for the group is a subsection of the professional class of Reagan-era America that embraced the "Greed is good" attitude that was often popular at the time. The term is usually but not always used in a derogatory sense, the connotations usually being that the person described as a yuppie is arrogant, reckless, hedonistic, and above all, materialistic. Another connotation carried by the term is that the yuppie is possibly a drug user, generally meaning cocaine, the drug of choice of the Reagan-era yuppies.
In more recent times, the yuppie as a section of the culture with a defined philosophy has declined somewhat, partly due to the mainstream population co-opting a few of the yuppie traits. The piece that remains distinct is usually that for the "yuppie products," most famously the "yuppie cars" such as BMW and Mercedes-Benz. However, these as well are becoming less distinct, as the general population sometimes co-opts the products, such as cellular phones, bottled water, and basically everything else mentioned in a day's worth of Comedy Central.