meat puppet

Noun

meat puppet (plural meat puppets)

1. A human body without consciousness.
   • Blood-spurting meat puppets did herky-jerky hulas as the lethal barrage of multipurpose rounds struck their targets with pinpoint accuracy and devastating results.1991 ·, John Sievert, Death Zone Attack, page 52
   • He never really woke again, not in a form I could say good-bye to; he became simply a meat puppet in an immense bed, a pistil in a rose.1997, Jan Zita Grover, North Enough: AIDS and Other Clear-Cuts, page 69
2. A person who mindlessly follows the commands of others.
   • This takes on serious implications if the meat puppet itself can be spammed — personality could be erased, augmented, juxtaposed, stolen or hidden behind — and presumably there would be attempts to make such activities illegal.1998, Neil Spiller, Digital Dreams: Architecture and the New Alchemic Technologies, page 69
   • He, too, was a meat puppet. Unable to make any decision without imagined repercussions from above, he chose to make none and instead passed his decision onto the next guy up the food chain.1998, Luke Sullivan, "Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This": A Guide to Creating Great Ads, page 164
3. (derogatory, slang) A newsreader, especially one who is not a reporter.
   • I played what Penn likes to refer to as “the meat puppet.” It’s a term he picked up from television cameramen, who invented it as a description of some of the beautiful but vacant people who recite the local news.1989, Calvin Trillin, “A Couple of Eccentric Guys”, in The New Yorker
   • I fancy that I can factor in the Times' slant, but it would be better if news didn't even pretend to be objective. I'd like the meat puppet on the nightly news to say, "Today Perot, the big-eared psychotic, unveiled his so-called economic plant."1993, PC/Computing - Volume 6, page 394
4. A body that is controlled by someone or something else.
   • In a reversal of McLuhan, "man" becomes the extension of the nanotechnological, a meat puppet run by molecular machines.1990, Qui Parle - Volumes 4-5, page 16
   • I am just not that meat puppet that you have been dealing with on the 'outside. ' He was a second rate bureaucrat working out of some obscure Washington office. His body served me well, as others have for generations.1995, David F. Gray, The Shepherd's Man, page 340
5. (slang) A penis.
   • Here, sonny, want to see my meat puppet?1990, Matthew J. Costello, Midsummer, page 176
   • I landed on the handle of the cart and hurt my meat puppet.2003, Richard Herring, Talking Cock, page 206
6. A user who makes unconstructive edits on behalf of another user.