George Lakoff (and others) on "foodie"

[Ben Zimmer]

On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 11:41 AM, ADSGarson O'Toole wrote:
> [Larry wrote:]
>> You'd think a more relevant example might be "hippie",
>> "Yippee", or even "commie", where an Xie is someone
>> adhering to the X philosophy or an aficionado/true-believer
>> in X.
>
> Yippee is derived from the acronym of Youth International Party. A
> similarly acronymic word would be yuppie derived from "young urban
> professional". Foodie is not based on an acronym, but it might be
> connotatively or demographically related to yuppie.

Some relevant history: Though the first known use of "foodie" was by
New York restaurant critic Gael Greene in 1980, the British writer
Paul Levy came up with the term independently for the August 1982
issue of Harpers & Queen. Levy and his editor Ann Barr went on to
publish The Official Foodie Handbook, on the model of the "preppy" and
"yuppie" handbooks of the time.

--bgz

-- 
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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