Arppies ("asset rich, penny poor")

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:01 PM -0400 4/20/08, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>A new Yuppie-esque acronym from Amanda Platell of the Daily Mail (UK):
>
>-----
>http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/columnists/columnists.html?in_article_id=560179&in_page_id=1772&in_author_id=463
>Don't worry...be *arppy (That's Asset-Rich, but penny-poor)
>Amanda Platell, Daily Mail
>17th April 2008
>
>People watchers have always wondered what happened to Yuppies, those
>thrusting, well-off young creatures with big hair and even bigger
>shoulder pads who ruled the world in the mid-Eighties.
>One moment they were bestriding the world, upending accepted social
>structures and earning easy money which was spent with equal ease (and
>too often vulgarity!).
>With bonuses that would make even a 21st century hedge fund manager
>blush, they actually invented the term conspicuous consumption.
>Yet almost overnight the Yuppies - short for young urban professionals
>- were gone.
>They disappeared quicker than you can say Tyrannosaurus rex. Extinct, defunct.
>Or so it was thought. Because the truth is the Yuppies didn't die,
>they just traded in their Porsches for property, their freedom for
>families and their spendthrift habits for school fees.
>They live and breathe among us today, but have morphed into a new breed.
>No longer Yuppies, they are now "Arppies" - that's short for asset
>rich, penny poor.
>Where once they were young and upwardly mobile, now they're middle
>aged and standing still.
>[etc.]
>-----
and if they hang around in a while they (or at least their colonial
cousins) will be AARPies.

LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org