George Lakoff (and others) on "foodie"

[Laurence Horn]

Ah, right, and these are interesting.  "Yuppie" is very much within this trajectory (formed on the basis of "yippie", which was based on "hippie", etc.), and then there are the spin-offs ("guppie", "buppie",…), while "preppy" is a nominalized adjective with a adjectivalizing -y, parallel to "(an) alcohol-ic".

LH


On Jul 1, 2014, at 12:05 PM, Ben Zimmer wrote:

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

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