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.
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. Yuppie was neither an acronym nor portmanteau, but rather, half ‘n' half.
The Eighties term, Yuppie, was in fact, the illegitimate bastard of the unholy union of the acronym Y.U.P. 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. And the previous meaning adhered as an echo in each further elaboration. 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.
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 ... so 1) does anybody out there know where those crumbs lead? 2) are there any other terms in current usage that have similar developmental histories?
Edit: An integral facet of my OP relates to the acronym/portmanteau controversy overheard in commentary and referred to above. This part of my question has only received explicit attention in commentary. My position is clearly stated so, 3) will those of you who feel I err please refute my position, citing to authority, in answer form?
Answer
It all starts with a little slang hep:
"aware, up-to-date," first recorded 1908 in "Saturday Evening Post," but said to be underworld slang, of unknown origin.
Variously said to have been the name of "a fabulous detective who operated in Cincinnati" [Louis E. Jackson and C.R. Hellyer, "A Vocabulary of Criminal Slang," 1914] or a saloonkeeper in Chicago who "never quite understood what was going on ... (but) thought he did" ["American Speech," XVI, 154/1].
Taken up by jazz musicians by 1915; hepcat "addict of swing music" is from 1938. With the rise of hip (adj.) by the 1950s, the use of hep ironically became a clue that the speaker was unaware and not up-to-date.
Hep grew up with his little sister hip:
in the sense of "aware, in the know" is first attested in a 1902 cartoon by Tad Dorgan,8 and first appeared in print in a 1904 novel by George Vere Hobart, Jim Hickey, A Story of the One-Night Stands, where an African American character uses the slang phrase "Are you hip?".9 Early currency of the term (as the past participle hipped, meaning informed), is further documented in the 1914 novel The Auction Block by Rex Beach:
His collection of Napoleana is the finest in this country; he is an authority on French history of that period—in fact, he's as nearly hipped on the subject as a man of his powers can be considered hipped on anything.10
"informed," 1904, apparently originally in black slang, probably a variant of hep (1), with which it is identical in sense, though it is recorded four years earlier.
The broader culture tasted hip and hep in the 40's:
After the Second World War, the term moved into general parlance, Jack Kerouac for example describing his mid-century contemporaries as "the new American generation known as the 'Hip' (the Knowing)";[11] while in 1947, Harry "The Hipster" Gibson wrote the song "It Ain't Hep" about the switch from hep to hip:
Hey you know there's a lot of talk going around about this hip and hep jive. Lots of people are going around saying "hip." Lots of squares are coming out with "hep." Well the hipster is here to inform you what the jive is all about.
They dumped hep and drank hip with the Beatnicks through the 50's and into the 60's:
: a young person who was part of a social group in the 1950s and early 1960s that rejected the traditional rules of society and encouraged people to express themselves through art
The Beatniks were called hipsters, but they were transformed to hippies when they mainlined their sophisticated, fashionable, up-to-date rejection of the status quo through the 60's and 70's:
The word 'hippie' came from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into New York City's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. The origins of the terms hip and hep are uncertain, although by the 1940s both had become part of African American jive slang and meant "sophisticated; currently fashionable; fully up-to-date".13 The Beats adopted the term hip, and early hippies inherited the language and countercultural values of the Beat Generation. Hippies created their own communities, listened to psychedelic music, embraced the sexual revolution, and used drugs such as cannabis, LSD, peyote and psilocybin mushrooms to explore altered states of consciousness.
Abbie Hoffman launched the Youth International Party on December 31, 1967, and they co-opted the conventional contempt in the hippies monicker by attaching the same derogatory suffix -pies to their acronym YIPpies:
The Yippies had no formal membership or hierarchy. Abbie Hoffman, Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Nancy Kurshan, and Paul Krassner founded the Yippies (according to his own account, Krassner coined the name) at a meeting in Abbie and Anita's New York flat on December 31, 1967.7 "If the press had created 'hippie,' could not we five hatch the 'yippie'?" Abbie Hoffman wrote.4
Eventually, the Hippies and Yippies made babies with all that free sex, but in the 80's, their children rebelled against the counterculture, as displayed in the wildly popular television sitcom Family Ties:
an American sitcom that aired on NBC from September 22, 1982 until May 14, 1989. The series, created by Gary David Goldberg, reflected the move in the United States from the cultural liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s to the conservatism of the 1980s.2 This was particularly expressed through the relationship between young Republican Alex P. Keaton (Michael J. Fox) and his ex-hippie parents, Steven and Elyse Keaton.
The "adherents" of this conservative backlash were labeled Yuppies which apparently blended the derogatory suffix -pies from hippies and yippies with the new acronym:
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.
The contracted blend of the acronym YUP with hippie and yippie suggests a classification of portmanteau. The worthy objection arises that attaching a common -ie suffix with the extra p is not actually a blend, but it is my opinion that the shared emotional baggage of these three iconic -pies cemented a unique linguistic bond that transcends a shared suffix--they became the nucleus of a new semantic family of cultural affinity.
So the spaced-out hippie yippies lived happily ever after with the stressed-out yuppies and all their other -pie progeny.
www.etymonline.com
en.wikipedia.org
www.merriam-webster.com
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