Wikidiffcom vs Babbitt - What's the difference?
wikidiffcom | babbitt |
A person who subscribes complacently to materialistic middle-class ideals
* 1930 The Literary digest , Volume 105, Funk and Wagnalls, p21
* 2002 Tamkang review , Volume 33, Tamkang College of Arts and Sciences, p158
* 2003 William Hyland, George Gershwin: a new biography, Greenwood Publishing Group, p116
As a noun babbitt is
a person who subscribes complacently to materialistic middle-class ideals.wikidiffcom
Not English
Wikidiffcom has no English definition. It may be misspelled.babbitt
English
(Webster 1913)Etymology 1
Named for American inventor Isaac Babbitt (1799–1862)Etymology 2
Named after the title character in Sinclair Lewis' 1922 novel, Babbit.'' Also popularised by the George and Ira Gershwin song "The Babbitt and the Bromide," featured first in the 1927 musical "Funny Face" and later in the film ''Ziegfeld Follies (1945).Alternative forms
BabbittNoun
(en noun)- One speaks of a babbitt' habit, a '''babbitt era. Nothing is more true. America recognized itself in ''Babbitt , it demurred, but it also admired.
- [...] a "babbitt " is a person full of self-confident bluster who is nevertheless a narrowminded philistine and a hypocrite.
- Ira relished telling the story that Fred Astaire took him aside and said he knew what a babbitt was, but what was a bromide?
