Akademik

n.

An urban professional who is socially conscious.

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

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

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