Relating to or characteristic of George Babbitt, a fictional character representing a conformist businessman who blindly follows social conventions and commercial values.
From Sinclair Lewis's 1922 novel 'Babbitt,' which satirized American materialism and conformity. The character name itself derived from combining babble with -it, suggesting shallow talk. The suffix -ian makes it adjectival.
Sinclair Lewis created Babbitt to criticize 1920s American consumer culture, and the word became so powerful that 'babbittry' entered dictionaries as a permanent critique of mindless conformity—proving that great literature can literally change how we speak about society.
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