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Obviating creeping meatballism

This post could very well have been titled “Fun with a thesaurus!” but I like the glint of the word parade I assembled instead. A little while ago I was writing late at night at wanted a word stronger than “ignorance” and less insulting than “hebetude” (I settled on the tastefully academic-sounding “illiteracy”) and slouching in the list was an entry for “creeping meatballism.” What the hell?

Because I’m throughly uncultured, I thought it was a prank somehow, and considered submitting it to Digg. That suspicion of mine also reveals a cripplingly weak understanding of closed versus open systems in content production. Did I think somebody had clicked “Edit this article” on the thesaurus entry for “ignorance” and added this weird phrase? Sheesh.

So I wreak my Google Fu and find out that the term refers to an article from 1957 by Jean Shepherd entitled “Night People vs. Creeping Meatballism,” in which the author attempts to persuade his readers to combat consumer culture and learn to laugh it out the door at every opportunity. (View a high-quality scanned version of the article here.) Here’s a snippet.

The average person today thinks in certain prescribed patterns. People today have a genuine fear of stepping out and thinking on their own. “Creeping Meatballism” is this rejection of individuality. It’s conformity.

[…]

The guy who has been taken in by the “Meatball” philosophy is the guy who really believes that contemporary people are slim, and clean-limbed, and they’re so much fun to be with… because they drink Pepsi-Cola. As long as he believes this, he’s in the clutches of “Creeping Meatballism”. He’s a “Day People”. Let me give you some examples of “Creeping Meatballism” at work..

My appreciation of American culture just leveled up. I guess it makes sense for a thesaurus to include this entry as a synonym for “ignorance,” but I definitely have a problem with the fact that there’s no dictionary entry for it:

There are no dictionary entries for creeping meatballism, but creeping is spelled correctly.

Fantastic. Thanks a million for that one, Dictionary.com, you useless piece of trash.

Now, the most interesting aspect of my forays across the information superhighway was that I found out that I really should know who Jean Shepherd is. He’s the mastermind behind the movie A Christmas Story, having written both the novel on which it was based and most of the screenplay. Unfortunately, the film is on neither the top 100 films nor the 100 funniest films list put out by the AFI. That’s a damn shame, though it kind of curiously affirms Shepherd’s creeping meatball theory.

I also found an article in Time covering Shepherd’s radio antics, dated 1956. (He obviously talked about this night versus day person thing a lot, as the article quotes definitions of creeping meatballism not found in the 1957 version.) The article discusses Shepherd’s being alternately banned from and quickly regiven access to airwaves in America. To complement this, there’s a New York Times article from 2000 which details the influence his work wrought across American media, taking a look at the generous memorials given him, by journalists as illustrious as those responsible for NPR’s All Things Considered.

Now please excuse me while I go shoot my eye out.