upwardly mobile

upwardly mobile

Ascending or having the ability to ascend in social rank, esteem, or class. I was worried that Janet's wealthy parents would think I wasn't upwardly mobile enough to go out with their daughter. It wasn't until I received my uncle's large inheritance that I became in any way upwardly mobile.
See also: mobile
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

upwardly mobile

If someone is upwardly mobile, they are moving to a higher social position. The Party has been unable to attract upwardly mobile voters. Note: You can describe people who are moving to a lower social position as downwardly mobile. I'm the only downwardly mobile one. My brother's a barrister, and my sister is a barrister who married a High Court judge.
See also: mobile
Collins COBUILD Idioms Dictionary, 3rd ed.
See also:
  • downwardly mobile
  • mobile
  • only if
  • rank above
  • rank above (someone or something)
  • ranking
  • rank below (someone or something)
  • reckon (someone or something) into (something)
  • reckon into
  • score (something) off (someone, something, or some place)
References in periodicals archive
Hydrangea macrophylla in Chelsea gold medalwinning Upwardly Mobile Garden
Makeup sales increased 2.8% to $2.5 billion, largely driven by multipurpose products that cater to the modern and upwardly mobile woman.
Even if you're lucky enough to be upwardly mobile, the baffling array of mutual funds, RRSP options and other planning strategies is enough to make your head spin.
But like many an upwardly mobile immigrant or member of a minority group, she feels ambivalent about the costs of her academic success, which has made her and others like her aliens in their own families.
Reuters is reporting that the Swiss global marketer Movenpick Foods has opened its first premium ice cream and coffee "boutique" in India, hoping to woo upwardly mobile Indians with higher disposable incomes.
Bill and the prosperity of the postwar boom allowed millions of Catholic veterans to go to college, enter the professional class, and join the upwardly mobile migration to the suburbs.
Jake King's upwardly mobile outfit really should have been celebrating their first win at Victoria Park for 40 years.
Or maybe it really is the conviction that the upwardly mobile Republicans of the South care only about banning abortion, denouncing television, and censoring the Internet - and that the South is all of America.
The biggest change, by far, is the replacement of the upwardly mobile male breadwinner and housewife as the dominant family type by the staying-afloat family of two working parents and a child-care provider.
No longer the party of blue-collar workers, blacks, women, immigrants, and the poor, the party of the New Democrats now speaks proudly for information-age technocrats, suburbanites, yuppies, elite professionals, and the upwardly mobile portions of the middle class.
American novelist and short-story writer whose sparingly styled fiction stands as a social history of upwardly mobile Americans from the 1920s through the 1940s.
TREES: upwardly mobile members of the plant world; the tallest, largest, longest-living green plants.
These new faces represent that minority of the African-American church community which is middle-class, upwardly mobile, and eager to collaborate with conservative politicians.
This is mainly due, I suspect, to the thinking of many upwardly mobile Catholics.
Esposito deplores the lack of attention by the American media to the fact that most "fundamentalists" are young, ambitious, upwardly mobile immigrants to the larger cities of the Islamic world who have capped a traditional upbringing in their native villages with university training in such "modern" fields as medicine, science or engineering.