Allusions from Literature Flashcards
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
Babbitt
gigantic, enormous, on a large scale, enlarged; after Brobdingnag, the land of giants visited by Gulliver in Gullivar’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift
Brobdingnagian
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
Bumble
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
Cinderella
a libertine, profligate, a man obsessed with seducing women; after the legendary 14th century Spanish nobleman and libertine
Don Juan
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
Don Quixote
blindly or misleadingly optimistic; after Dr. Pangloss in Candide by Voltaire, a pedantic old tutor
Panglossian
full of wit and bawdy humor; after Falstaff, a fat, sensual, boastful, and mendacious knight
Falstaffian
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
Frankenstein
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
Friday
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
Galahad
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)
Jekyll and Hyde
descriptive of a very small person or of something diminutive, trivial or petty; after the Lilliputians, tiny people in GT by JS
Lilliputian
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
Little Lord Fauntleroy
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
Lothario
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
malapropism
a timid, weak, or unassertive person; from Casper Milquetoast, who was a comic strip character created by HT Webster
Milquetoast
humorous, sometimes derogatory; from Samuel Pickwick, a character in Charles’ Dickens’ Pickwickian Papers
Pickwickian
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 ____
Pollyanna
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
Pooh-bah
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
Quixotic
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
robot
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
Rodomontade
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
Scrooge
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
Simon Legree
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
Svengali
hypocrite or someone who is hypocritical; central character in a comedy by Moliere produced in 1667; Moliere was famous for his hypocritical piety
Tartuffe
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
Uncle Tom
a fawning toadie, an obsequious person; from a character in CD’s David Copperfield
Uriah Heep
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
Walter Mitty
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
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