scuppie

n.

An urban professional who is socially conscious.

Example Citations:

I don't need to care what sort of world we pass on to our children — I don't have any, and I'm not terribly concerned about yours — but I do anyway. Not enough to go to extremes of effort or expense, but if I can give a beer bottle or hummus tub a second life by putting it in an orange bin rather than a trash bag, you can count on me.

I'm not a true scuppie — a Socially Conscious Upwardly Mobile Person — because newspaper people are not so much upwardly mobile as backwardly noble. I can't afford to blow the rent money at Whole Foods on organic cruelty-free, hand-churned onion dip or imported free-trade hemp dental floss.

—Samantha Bennett, "How Green Is My Footprint?," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 27, 2008

It's the latest in must-haves for any self-respecting Scuppie (Socially Conscious Upwardly Mobile Person). Bamboo is a mobile phone that is about as green as it gets. It is powered by winding — with a little crank. A three-minute session produces enough power to make one call so it never runs out of energy (and the user benefits from the mini-workouts).

—"Food for thought in muscle power, gravity and bamboo shoots," The Sunday Independent, March 9, 2008

Earliest Citation:

Still the acronyms flow in. The bobos — "burnt-out but opulent". The dimbos — "delightfully interesting male, brain optional". The scuppies — "socially conscious urban professionals".

—"Regular shorts," Sydney Morning Herald, November 16, 1988

Notes:

Thanks to Ronnie Perlmutter for passing along this term. For more than you probably ever want to know about the scuppie archetype, see Charles Failla's comprehensive Scuppie Handbook: http://scuppie.com/. This site glosses scuppie as a "Socially Conscious Upwardly-mobile Person," hiding the extraneous mobile term in an all-lowercase disguise. However, the term scuppie is clearly modeled on yuppie — young urban professional — so a better expansion of scuppie is "socially conscious urban professional" (no case tricks required).

Note, too, that the original sense of scuppie was "senior citizen urban professional":

Somehow certain young people automatically assume that anyone over 55 years of age driving a car must be (1) senile, (2) stupid, (3) audiovisually impaired, or (4) a combination of all three. Since I qualify as a typical scuppie (senior citizen yuppie) I would like to challenge those opinions by turning the tables to some of the manners displayed by a minority of these people.

—Dolly Sherman, "So it's scuppie vs. the puppies," The San Diego Union-Tribune, July 14, 1987

Related Words:

checkbook environmentalist

competitive compassion

conspicuous austerity

conspicuous conservation

duppie

fiver

huppie

luppie

skippie

vacationary

voluntourism

yuppie slum

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