Is the word "Yuppie" negative/ironic? [closed]

"You are like a Yuppie". Is this an insult or is it neutral.

I have always thought that the word itself is neutral but Oxford dictionaries categorize it as derogatory.

The term soon acquired a negative connotation according to Etymonline:

Yuppie:

1982, acronym from "young urban professional," ousting competition from yumpie (1984), from "young upward-mobile professional," and yap (1984), from "young aspiring professional." The word was felt as an insult by 1985.

From Wikipedia:

In a 1985 issue of The Wall Street Journal, Theressa Kersten at SRI International described a "yuppie backlash" by people who fit the demographic profile yet express resentment of the label: "You're talking about a class of people who put off having families so they can make payments on the SAABs ... To be a Yuppie is to be a loathsome undesirable creature". Leo Shapiro, a market researcher in Chicago, responded, "Stereotyping always winds up being derogatory. It doesn't matter whether you are trying to advertise to farmers, Hispanics or Yuppies, no one likes to be neatly lumped into some group."

The word lost most of its political connotations and, particularly after the 1987 stock market crash, gained the negative socio-economic connotations that it sports today. On April 8, 1991, Time magazine proclaimed the death of the "yuppie" in a mock obituary.

I think that yuppie was intended as a mildly derogatory term from the outset of its mainstream use. "Now You Know What Yuppies Are," an Associated Press story printed in the San Bernardino [California] Sun (January 5, 1984) makes clear the disapproving edge that the term possessed even at that early date:

NEW YORK (AP) — You've just come off the squash courts and you've come home to your loft for a quick pasta-and-endive salad before you're off to a Woody Allen retrospective.

You're a YAP, says C.E. Crimmins in "YAP—The Official Young Aspiring Professional's Fast-Track Handbook."

You're a Yuppie—a Young Urban Professional—say Marissa Piesman and Marilee Hartley in "The Yuppie Handbook."

Both handbooks, published within 90 days of one another, spoof the affluent baby-boomers, their penchant for what they believe to be the finer things and their mania for self-improvement and exercise.

A YAP, says Crimmins, uses words like interface and prioritize and network. He (or she) collects kitchen appliances, but never has the time to cook, and is much into beepers.

"The name of the game is THE BEST—buying it, owning it, using it, eating it, watching it, wearing it, growing it, cooking it, driving it, doing whatever with it,," say Piesman and Hartley.

Yuppies, say the authors, never will eat or drink anything instant, read a tabloid newspaper, wear any synthetic fabric or attend a museum exhibit unless advance tickets are required.

Of course, there are subspecies, including Buppies, Guppies, and Puppies—black, gay and pregnant urban professionals.

One way to look at Y.A.P.—The Official Young Aspiring Professional's Fast-Track Handbook (1983) and The Yuppie Handbook (1984) is as gently humorous send-ups of members of a newly identified privileged social class dedicated to trendiness, conspicuous consumption, and endless proofs of having superior taste. But that's a conclusion you might reach without access to any historical context.

Specifically, the fact that two competing handbooks dedicated to affluent young professionals were published within 90 days of each other is not merely an odd historical coincidence. From "What Johnny Reads," in The Alcalde [the University of Texas alumni magazine] (May 1982):

The number one best-selling book on college campuses in 1981, according to a survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education, was The Official Preppy Handbook, edited by Lisa Birnbach. It was followed by 101 Uses for a Dead Cat, by Simon Bond,; What Color Is Your Parachute?, by Richard Nelson Bolles; Garfield Gains Weight, by Jim Davis; and The Simple Solution to Rubik's Cube by James G. Nourse.

Lisa Birnbach's The Official Preppy Handbook (1980) was a huge hit in the U.S. book market during the years 1980–1982. It described the lifestyles and concerns of old teenagers/young adults in a continuum ranging from old money (think an adolescent Thurston Howell III) to new money (think an adolescent Donald Trump); naturally everyone who wasn't a preppy got in line to buy a book that made fun of preppies' sense of self-importance and entitlement.

In fact, according to an undated New York Times Book Review column by Ray Walters, reprinted in Paperback Talk (1985), The Official Preppy Handbook "has been on the best seller list for 39 weeks, 17 of them in the No. 1 spot." It also inspired a moderately successful backlash book, Ralph Schoenstein's The I-Hate-Preppies Handbook: A Guide for the Rest of Us (1981).

So, alternatively, when the Y.A.P. handbook and The Yuppie Handbook came out in late 1983 and early 1984, those books could be seen as a cynical attempt by publishers to cash in on the phenomenal success of The Official Preppy Handbook, by riffing on a now-established "official handbook" model that played primarily to readers' feelings of mockery and covert envy. Essentially, YAPs and yuppies were preppies who had matriculated into lucrative positions at Father's investment firm.

According to David Popenoe, Sociology (1986[?]), the term yuppie originated as term to describe former campus radicals of the 1960s who had evolved into dedicated capitalists by the early 1980s:

"Youth International Party"—the so-called Yippies—had been a fearsome radical. In 1983, someone who remembered the old Rubin remarked to a columnist, Bob Greene, that the former Yippie seemed to have become a spokesman for the "Yuppies"—young urban professionals. A word was born.

If Rubin was the first Yuppie, he was also in some ways a fairly typical one. For the Yuppies, like the "Flower Children" of the 1960s and the "Me Generation" of the 1970s, are products of the Baby Boom of 1946-1964 (see Chapter 19), much as Rubin himself is. What a change, though! In the late 1960s the Yippies had rebelled against the Establishment. In the 1970s, however, they largely abandoned politics and took up jogging, cat books, and Indian religions. Now the Baby Boomers were old enough to hold responsible, well-paying jobs in business and the professions, and their incomes and attitudes reflected the change. Yuppies are said, for example, to resent high taxes and expensive social programs.

Much of this analysis may be superficial claptrap, and I have no idea whether Bob Greene actually coined the term yuppie. Nevertheless, the excerpt does suggest that yuppie, when first popularized, already had a sarcastic/disapproving component inherent in its allusion to the materialist conversion of supposed young idealists into slightly older keepers-up with the Joneses. The implication is even more striking when you consider that Yippie was itself a politicized play on hippie—the all-purpose term for long-haired, anti–Vietnam War, countercultural U.S. young people of the 1960s. The term yuppie thus appealed both to older establishment types, who welcomed (with a certain "I-knew-this-would-happen" smugness) the emergence of a socioeconomic category of capitalist prodigals as a vindication of traditional materialism, and to whatever remnant of the old counterculturalist cadres remained true to their earlier anti-materialist ethos, who viewed them as repugnant sellouts.

Google Books searches for yuppie and yuppies from before 1984 return a number of false positives interspersed with some matches from the very early 1980s whose publication dates may be valid but that I could not independently confirm. The most defensible view of the term is that it gained mass currency in 1983–1984 and that, from very early on, people used it in an uncomplimentary way.