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Literary Allusions

Terms in this set (21)

Babbitt
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 George F. Babbitt, the main character in the novel Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
Brobdingnagian
gigantic, enormous, on a large scale, enlarged; after Brobdingnag, the land of giants visited by Gulliver in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Don Juan
a libertine, profligate, a man obsessed with seducing women; after Don Juan, the legendary 14th century Spanish nobleman and libertine
Don Quixote
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
Frankenstein
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
Friday
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
Galahad
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
Jekyll and Hyde
A capricious person with two sides to his/her personality; from a character in the famous novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde who had more than one personality, a split personality (one good and one evil)
Lilliputian
descriptive of a very small person or of something diminutive, trivial, or petty; after the Lilliputians, tiny people in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Lothario
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
Malapropism
The usually unintentional humorous misuse or distortion of a word or phrase, especially the use of a word sounding somewhat like the one intended, but ludicrously wrong in context.

Example: polo bears

Mrs. Malaprop was a character noted for her misuse of words in R.B. Sheridan's comedy, The Rivals
Milquetoast
a timed, weak, or unassertive person; from Casper Milquetoast, who was a comic strip character created by H.T. Webster
Pollyanna
a person characterized by impermissible optimism and a tendency to fin good in everything, a foolishly or blindly optimistic person; from Eleanor Porter's heroine, Pollyanna Whittier, in the book, Pollyanna
Quixotic
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 the novel, Don Quixote
Robot
a machine that looks like a human being and performs various acts of a human being; 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 Rossum's novel, Universal Robots (1920), taken from the Czech "robota", meaning drudgery
Scrooge
a bitter and/or greedy person; from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol; an elderly, stingy miser who is given a reality check by three visiting ghosts
Simon Legree
a harsh, cruel, or demanding person in authority, such as an employer or officer that acts in this manner; the brutal slave overseer from "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriett Beecher Stowe
Svengali
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
Uncle Tom
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 Uncle Tom's cabin by abolitionist writer Stowe
Walter Mitty
a commonplace, non-adventuresome person who seeks escape from reality through daydreaming; a henpecked husband or dreamer named after the "hero" in a story by James Thurber
Yahoo
a boorish, crass, or stupid person; from a member of a race of brutes in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels who have the form and all the vices of humans
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