Babbitt
/ˈbabɪt
/noun dated, chiefly North American
A materialistic, complacent, and conformist businessman.I think she believed it would liberate the American imagination, and teach the googly-eyed Babbitts who beheld the pictures that sex was something more than they believed it was....
- Such expectations are contrary to basic principles of academic freedom and will contribute to a college or university ‘replete with genial Babbitts.’
- People who don't live in New York, Hollywood, or divide their time between Virginia, Hyannis Port, or Nantucket estates and their Georgetown mansions view the rest of us as Babbitts.
Derivatives
Babbittry
- Lewis was already at work on Babbitt when he and Gracie traveled around England in 1921, and he prophesied, correctly, that ‘two years from now we'll have them talking of Babbittry.’
- I had always rejected the suburban ideal of the carefully clipped and methodically poisoned greensward, with its connotations of Babbittry and mundane middle-class aesthetics.
- Franklin's concentration on civic well-being and societies for mutual benefit have earned him a reputation for boosterism and Babbittry.
Origin
From the name George Babbitt, the protagonist of the novel Babbitt (1922) by Sinclair Lewis.