Alice Kahn

Alice Joyce Kahn (born 1943 ) is an American nurse practitioner and humorist who popularized the slang word "yuppie", describing young urban professionals, and also the term "Gourmet Ghetto", naming an influential retail neighborhood of Berkeley, California. Kahn was a regular contributor to East Bay Express, a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, and a syndicated columnist at the Los Angeles Times. She has also written for Mother Jones magazine and the San Jose Mercury News. A self-professed "sit-down comic" noted for her "Jewish-American wit", The Chicago Reader commented on her liberal political viewpoint, writing that she was "Joan Rivers with a social conscience."

Early life and career Kahn was born Alice Joyce Nelson and raised in West Side, Chicago, in the Lawndale neighborhood. Her outgoing, debonair father was Herman Nelson, and her mother was the former Idelle Avonovitch, a comparatively sheltered young woman from a shtetl in the Suwałki Region of Poland. Kahn had one older sister named Myrna Lou Nelson. Kahn's parents were Orthodox Jews but they advised their girls to follow more modern practices. She attended Senn High School, where she met Edward Paul Kahn, her future husband. She enrolled in 1961 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Various origin stories exist for the term "gourmet ghetto": Kahn said that she did not coin the term. One apocryphal story is that columnist Herb Caen used the term, but if so, he did not write it down. (Henriques later moved to Los Angeles to act in comedies, and played a gun salesman in the 1995 film Jumanji.) By 1980 the nickname was widely established: writer and editor Sandra Rosenzweig wrote about Northern California restaurants for Clay Felker's New West magazine based in Los Angeles, saying that Rosenthal's deli was "Located in the heart of Berkeley's gourmet ghetto – next door to Cocolat and half a block from Chez Panisse".

Kahn took inspiration from the 1983 Roz Chast comic "Attack of the Young Professionals!" In early 1983, Kahn began writing an article about young urban professionals named Dirk and Brie, a satirical faux-sociological study. She coined the word "yuppie" for the article, basing it on the word "yups" appearing in the Chicago Reader, and on a New Yorker magazine cartoon by Roz Chast titled "Attack of the Young Professionals!", published in April 1983. She was unaware the word yuppie had been used earlier. Kahn's piece was a more thorough description, more definitive, and after it was reprinted by other publications, it served to popularize the term to a greater degree.

Books 1985 – Multiple Sarcasm, Ten Speed Press 1987 – My Life as a Gal, Delacorte 1990 – Luncheon at the Cafe Ridiculous, Poseidon Press 1991 – Fun with Dirk and Bree, Poseidon Press. 1997 – Your Joke is in the E-Mail: Cyberlaffs from Mousepotatoes, with John Dobby Boe. Ten Speed Press.