English
wikipedia
Etymology
From the novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess, in which the main character is programed to perform only good.
Noun
en-noun|sg=clockwork orange
- A person or organism with a mechanistic morality or lack of free will.
#*1996: Mark Dery, Escape Velocity
#*:Contrarily, he may be saying, �Look what your computerized, commodified society has made of me�a clockwork orange, for all appearances organic but mechanical."
#*1998: Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction
#*:The telos of the pathologization of crime is the perfected robot or �clockwork orange� of present-day behaviorism and sociobiology, descendants of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century asociationists like Jeremy Bentham.
#*1999: Diederik Aerts, Jan Broekaert, Ernest Mathijs, Einstein Meets Magritte: An Interdisciplinary Reflection: The White Book of "Einstein Meets Magritte
#*:This one took reality to be a large machine, a �clockwork orange', an automaton.
#*2004: Enoch Brater, Arthur Miller's America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change
#*:Under the archbishop's ceiling, the self is not a clockwork orange programmed by the state but something more unnerving: Peer Gynt's onion, layers of performance without a core.
Related terms
queer as a clockwork orange
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