Allusions from Literature

Question 1

a self-satisfied person concerned chiefly with business and middle-class ideals like material success; a member of the American working class whose unthinking attachment to its business and social ideals is such to make him a model of narrow-mindedness and self-satisfaction; after the main character in the novel by Sinclair Lewis

Answer 1

Babbitt

Question 2

gigantic, enormous, on a large scale, enlarged; after Brobdingnag, the land of giants visited by Gulliver in Gullivar’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift

Answer 2

Brobdingnagian

Question 3

to speak or behave clumsily or faltering, to make a humming or droning sound; Middle English: bomblem, a clumsy religious figure ( a beadle) in a work of literature

Answer 3

Bumble

Question 4

one who gains affluence or recongnition after obscurity and neglect, a person or thing whose beauty or worth remains unrecognized; after the fairytale heroine who escapes from a life of drudgery through the intervention of a fairy godmother and marries a handsome prince

Answer 4

Cinderella

Question 5

a libertine, profligate, a man obsessed with seducing women; after the legendary 14th century Spanish nobleman and libertine

Answer 5

Don Juan

Question 6

someone overly idealistic to the point of having impossible dreams; from the crazed and impoverished Spanish noble who sets out to revive the glory of knighthood, romanticized in the musical The Man of La Mancha based on the story by Cervantes

Answer 6

Don Quixote

Question 7

blindly or misleadingly optimistic; after Dr. Pangloss in Candide by Voltaire, a pedantic old tutor

Answer 7

Panglossian

Question 8

full of wit and bawdy humor; after Falstaff, a fat, sensual, boastful, and mendacious knight

Answer 8

Falstaffian

Question 9

anything that threatens or destroys its creator; from the young scientist in Mary Shelley’s novel of this name, who creates a monster that eventually destroys him

Answer 9

Frankenstein

Question 10

a faithful and willing attendant, ready to turn his hand to anything; from the young savage found by Robinson Crusoe on a Friday, and kept as his servant and companion on the desert island

Answer 10

Friday

Question 11

a pure and noble man with limited ambition; in the legends of King Arthur, the purest and most virtuous knight of the Round Table, the only knight to find the Holy Grail

Answer 11

Galahad

Question 12

a capricious person with 2 sides to his/her personality; from a character in the famous novel where a character had more than one personality, a split personality (one good and one evil)

Answer 12

Jekyll and Hyde

Question 13

descriptive of a very small person or of something diminutive, trivial or petty; after the Lilliputians, tiny people in GT by JS

Answer 13

Lilliputian

Question 14

refers either to a certain type of children’s clothing or to a beautiful, but pampered and effeminate small boy; from a work by Frances H. Burnett, the main character, 7-yr-old Cedric Errol, a striking figure dressed in black velvet with a lace collar and yellow curls

Answer 14

Little Lord Fauntleroy

Question 15

used to describe a man whose chief interest is seducing a woman; from the play The Fair Penitent by Nicholas Rowe, the main character and the seducer

Answer 15

Lothario

Question 16

the usually unintentional humorous misuse or distortion of a word or phrase, esp. the use of a word somewhat like the one intended, but ludicrously wrong in context; Mrs. Malaprop was a character noted for her misuse of words in RB Sheridan’s comedy The Rivals

Answer 16

malapropism

Question 17

a timid, weak, or unassertive person; from Casper Milquetoast, who was a comic strip character created by HT Webster

Answer 17

Milquetoast

Question 18

humorous, sometimes derogatory; from Samuel Pickwick, a character in Charles’ Dickens’ Pickwickian Papers

Answer 18

Pickwickian

Question 19

a person characterized by impermissible optimism and a tendency to find good in everything, a foolishly or blindly optimistic person; from Eleanor Porter’s heroine, Pollyanna Whittier, in the book ____

Answer 19

Pollyanna

Question 20

a pompous, ostentatious official, esp. one who, holding many offices, fulfills none of them, a person who holds high office; after Pooh-bah Lord-High-Everything-Else, character in The Mikado, a musical by Gilbert and Sullivan

Answer 20

Pooh-bah

Question 21

having foolish and impractical ideas of honor, or schemes for the general good; after Don Quixote, a half-crazy reformer and knight of the supposed distressed in a novel by the same name

Answer 21

Quixotic

Question 22

a machine that looks like a human and performs various acts of a human, a similar but functional machine whose lack of capacity for human emotions is often emphasized by an efficient, insensitive person who functions automatically, a mechanism guided by controls from Karel Capek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots, taken from the Czech “robata,” meaning drudgery

Answer 22

robot

Question 23

bluster and boasting, to boast (rodomontading or rodomontaded); from Rodomont, a brave, but braggart knight in Bojardo’s Orlando Inamorato; King of Sarza or Algiers, son of Ulteus, and commander of both horse and foor in the Saracen Army

Answer 23

Rodomontade

Question 24

a bitter and/or greedy person; from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, an elderly stingy miser who is given a reality check by 3 visiting ghosts

Answer 24

Scrooge

Question 25

a harsh, cruel, or demanding person in authority, such as an employer or officer that acts in this manner; from Uncle Tom’s Cabin by HBS, the brutal slave overseer

Answer 25

Simon Legree

Question 26

a person with an irresistible hypnotic power; from a person in a novel written in 1894 by George Mauriers; a musician who hypnotizes and gains control over the heroine

Answer 26

Svengali

Question 27

hypocrite or someone who is hypocritical; central character in a comedy by Moliere produced in 1667; Moliere was famous for his hypocritical piety

Answer 27

Tartuffe

Question 28

someone thought to have the timid service attitude like that of a slave to his owner, from the humble pious, long-suffering Negro slave in UTC by HBS

Answer 28

Uncle Tom

Question 29

a fawning toadie, an obsequious person; from a character in CD’s David Copperfield

Answer 29

Uriah Heep

Question 30

a commonplace non-adventuresome person who seeks escape from reality through daydreaming, a henpecked husband or dreamer; after a daydreaming henpecked “hero” in a story by James Thurber

Answer 30

Walter Mitty

Question 31

a boorish, crass, or stupid person; from a member of a race of brutes in Swift’s GT who have the form and all the vices of humans

Answer 31

Yahoo