Rip Van Winkle

English

Etymology

From The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent by Washington Irving (1819).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˌrɪp van ˈwɪŋk(ə)l/

Proper noun

Rip Van Winkle

1. (fiction, US) A Dutch-American villager who falls asleep for 20 years and wakes up to a changed world, having missed the American Revolution; (by extension) someone or something stuck in the past.
   • 2021 September 27, Paul Krugman, “Biden Versus the Rip Van Winkle Caucus”, in The New York Times‎^[1], →ISSN:

     That is, it makes a lot of sense to see Biden’s problems getting his plans across the finish line as being caused by the Rip Van Winkle caucus, Democrats who checked out intellectually a couple of decades ago and haven’t caught up with America as it now is.

   • 2022 January 5, Rhonda Garelick, “Middle Age Doesn’t Happen ‘Just Like That’”, in The New York Times‎^[2], →ISSN:

     The characters do seem Rip Van Winkle-like, as they stumble upon and blink in amazement at very unsurprising things. “Wow! Instagram? Podcasts?” marvels Miranda at some of Carrie’s latest endeavors, as if these were edgy new enterprises.

   • 2022 January 13, Polly Toynbee, “Finally the Tory papers have caught on that Johnson is a liar – what kept them?”, in The Guardian‎^[3]:

     A Tory Rip Van Winkle waking from decades of sleep to look round that cabinet table now would be aghast.

Derived terms

• Rip Van Winkledom
• Rip Van Winkleish
• Rip Van Winklesque

Further reading

• Rip Van Winkle on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• “Rip Van Winkle”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.