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| 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 |
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| gigantic, enormous, on a large scale, enlarged; after Brobdingnag, the land of giants visited by Gullivar in Gullivar's Travels, by Jonathan Swift |
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| 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 |
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| one who gains affluence or recognition after obscurity and neglect, a person or thing whose beauty or worth remains unrecognized; after the fairy-tale heroine who escapes from a life of drudgery through the intervention of a fairy godmother and marries a handsome prince |
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| a libertine, profligate, a man obsessed with seducing women; after Don Juan, the legendary 14th century Spanish nobleman and libertine |
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| 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 |
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| blindly or misleadingly optimistic; after Dr. Pangloss in Candide by Voltaire, a pedantic old tutor |
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| full of wit and bawdy humor, after Falstaff, a fat, sensual, boastful and mendacious knight who was the companion of Henry, Prince of Wales |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| a pure and noble man with limited ambition; in the legends of King Arthur, the purest and most virtuous night of the Round Table, the only knight to find the holy grail |
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