Fwd: Yuppie (1981)

[bapopik at AOL.COM]

 FYI.
--Barry "It's good to be a candidate" Popik

-----Original Message-----
From: Ed Zotti
To: Bapopik
Sent: Mon, 18 Jul 2005 12:23:38 PM Eastern Daylight Time
Subject: Fwd: Yuppie (1981)


See attached - looks like no luck. Production of the paper was largely manual prior to 1988. Maybe someday they'll scan the whole thing in but this does not seem imminent. You might wish to contact Dick Longworth at the Chicago Tribune, author of the 1981 series in which "yuppie" appeared. It's possible he picked it up from the late Pierre deVise, a Chicago sociologist who wrote many demographic analyses of wealth and poverty in Chicago and would have been an early observer of the phenomenon. Another print source is Chicago magazine. No idea if their archive is online, but frankly they would have been likelier to write about this than the Reader. -Ed
Attached Message
From:Jim Shapiro <jshapiro at chicagoreader.com>
To:EdZotti at aol.com
Subject:Re: Fwd: Yuppie (1981)
Date:Fri, 15 Jul 2005 20:41:51 -0500

As Ben Zimmer says at the bottom of this thread, as of now the online archive goes back only to '88. So any prior uses of "yuppie" in the Reader will have to be located the old-fashioned way: force prisoners to look through the print archives.

At 02:12 PM 7/14/2005, you wrote:

>>From my bud Barry Popik. Not sure how much old Reader stuff is online but
seem to recall your finding some fairly obscure item - if we in fact have an
online archive can you search for "yuppie"? Thanks. -Ed
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I just found the earliest "yuppie" in the newly digitized Chicago Tribune, from 1981. Alice Kahn (out in San Francisco) had previously (falsely) received credit for coining "yuppie."
...
Is "yuppie" anywhere in the Chicago Reader of 1980-1981?
...
Barry Popik
www.barrypopik.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at RCI.RUTGERS.EDU>
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Sent: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 14:50:37 -0400
Subject: Re: Yuppie (1981)


On Wed, 13 Jul 2005 04:15:23 EDT, Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:

>_Chicago:  City on the brink; The social fallout of economic crisis
>Parts of city have  become economic wastelands _
>(http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=0&did=635134972&SrchMode=1&sid=7&Fmt=10&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=HNP&TS=1121242009&clientId=65882)
>R C Longworth.  Chicago Tribune (1963-Current file). Chicago, Ill.: May
>13, 1981. p. 1 (2 pages)
>First page:
>It's almost a cliche to say that Chicago is a collection of
>neighborhoods. Some are rich and healthy--Beverly with its mostly white
>population, Pill Hill with its mostly black professionals, Lincoln Park
>with its Yuppies (Young Urban Professionals).

Looks like Lincoln Park was the original yuppie epicenter...

-----
Chicago Tribune, July 26, 1982, p. B4/2
A North Side resident and jogger, Berger aims her act at the Lincoln Park
"yuppie" [young urban professional] set, seeming to delight them with
isn't-it-true observations on life near the lake.
-----

Local alternative weeklies like the Chicago Reader might have further
antedatings. (The Reader was founded in 1971, but the online archive only
goes back to 1988.)


--Ben Zimmer