Unfortunately at this point my brain-fog returned and the trail went cold so that’s as far back as I was able to follow the breadcrumbs. Just as Yippie was a play on Hippie while adopting an antithetical political stance, so too Yuppie is a play on Yippie, yet conceptually antithetical. And the previous meaning adhered as an echo in each further elaboration. with the late-Sixties to early Seventies term, YIPPIE, which in turn was an appropriation of the last syllable of the Sixties counter-cultural epithet, HIPPIE.
The Eighties term, Yuppie, was in fact, the illegitimate bastard of the unholy union of the acronym Y.U.P. Yuppie was neither an acronym nor portmanteau, but rather, half ‘n' half. Rapidly approaching the status of ‘ancient of days’, the term Yuppie brought me back (kicking and screaming, mind you) to the Eighties and made me long for the good ol’ days-the Sixties, man-when suddenly I had a flashback and the mental fog that is my cognitive life unaccountably dissipated long enough for me to realize that both of these users were wrong.
While innocently passing by on my way to Big Rep City, I happened to overhear (alright! I was dropping eaves) a dialogue in some podunk Commentary Cafe wherein two fellow ELU consumers were debating whether the term “Yuppie” was an acronym or a portmanteau.
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