Bobo Rules

First it was "Beatniks", then "Hippies" and "Yippies" and "Yuppies" - which in case you forgot - stood for "Young Upwardly Mobile People".

Now comes the "Bobo," a name that writer David Brooks has coined from the words "bourgeois" and "bohemian" to define the new social elite driving our economy.

In a hilarious new book, Bobos in Paradise, Brooks says it used to be easy to separate the bourgeois - they were the guys in suits who worked at the bank - from the bohemians, the artists and free thinkers who wore jeans.

But now, he says the bohemians and the bourgeois are all mixed up and have merged into a new elite defined by their shopping.

Tell us what you think of Bush and Gore on the Campaign 2000 bulletin board!

Guests never saw the kitchens of the old upper class. The Bobos entertain in kitchens the size of aircraft hangars.

Regular rich people wear suits. Bobos come to work in designer hiking boots as if in permanent anxiety about the threat of ice storms.

There's more just as funny, but I must add a personal disclosure.

For 30 years or so, for reasons that have nothing to do with any of the above, my family nickname has been "Bobo".

I'm just waiting for all those headlines that say, Bobo Rules.