Definition of "cracker-barrel" [cracker-barrel]

• Resembling or characteristic of the extended informal discussions carried on by persons habitually assembled at a country store: cracker-barrel philosophy. (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "With his rumpled clothes and corncob pipe, he was the image of the American cracker-barrel professor eager to mix it up with anyone in a public forum."
• "Atticus is a repository of cracker-barrel epigrams."
• "But then I never thought I'd see the day when "To Kill A Mockingbird" --- a novel that has inspired readers for half a century --- would be derided as a book about "the limitations of liberalism" (by Malcolm Gladwell, no less, in The New Yorker, of all places) and "a sugar-coated myth of Alabama's past" with a hero who's "a repository of cracker-barrel epigrams" (by Allen Barra, in the Wall Street Journal)"