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Dictionary:

highbrow

  ('brou') pronunciation
adj. also high·browed (-broud')

Of, relating to, or being highly cultured or intellectual: They only attend highbrow events such as the ballet or the opera.

n.

One who possesses or affects a high degree of culture or learning.

highbrowism high'brow'ism n.
 
 
Thesaurus: highbrow

adjective

    Appealing to or engaging the intellect: cerebral, intellectual, sophisticated, thoughtful. See thoughts.

 
Word Origin: highbrow

Origin: 1903

Americans can claim credit for both highbrow and lowbrow, the upper and lower levels of culture and cultivation. Highbrow seems to have come first, most likely around 1903, but lowbrow is close on its heels. In 1906 we have examples of both. That year the writer O. Henry refers to "the $250 that I screwed out of the high-browed and esteemed B. Merwin during your absence." As for lowbrow, we find it in S. Ford's Shorty McCabe: "The spaghetti works was in full blast, with a lot of husky low-brows goin' in and out." In Collier's the next year is a reference to "the overwhelming majority of Low Brows, who never read 'Peer Gynt.'" And in the Saturday Evening Post for 1908, we see highbrows again: "It takes all sorts of men to make a party, and Mr. Hearst apparently led in a few prize-fighters with the other high-brows and reformers he accumulated."

From the start, both terms were applied with tongue in cheek. They referred to the discredited phrenological notion that a person of superior intellect and culture would have a high forehead while an ignorant boor would have a low one.

A 1916 reviewer in The Nation took the distinction more seriously. Highbrow and lowbrow, he said, "stand for more genuine differences than Democrat and Republican. The one class has ideals, but no experience; it has flowered in an unfruitful transcendentalism. The other class has experience, but no ideals; its finished product is the millionaire. Each class looks with contempt, or rather with indifference, upon the other." The reviewer lamented this split, but in fact the two extremes of American culture seem to have prevented either side from taking itself too seriously. In the rest of the twentieth century both highbrows and lowbrows have had such success that American science, scholarship, and art on the one hand and practical inventions and popular culture on the other have swept throughout the world.



 
Wikipedia: highbrow
For the Transformers Headmaster character see Highbrow (Transformers).
Philip Melanchthon, engraving by Albrecht Dürer, 1526
Enlarge
Philip Melanchthon, engraving by Albrecht Dürer, 1526

Used as a noun or adjective, highbrow is synonymous with intellectual; as an adjective, it also means elite, and generally carries a connotation of high culture. The word draws its metonymy from the pseudoscience of phrenology, and was originally simply a physical descriptor. "Highbrow" can be applied to music, implying most of the classical music tradition and much of post-bebop jazz; to literature, i.e. literary fiction; to films in the arthouse line; and to comedy that requires significant understanding of analogies or references to appreciate.

The first recorded usage of the word highbrow was in 1875.[citation needed]

The opposite of highbrow is lowbrow.

The term middlebrow has been used to describe culture that was neither high nor low; it is frequently derogatory, as in Virginia Woolf's unsent letter to the New Statesman, written in the 1930s and later published in the book "The Death of the Moth and Other Essays" (1942). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word first appeared in print in 1925, in Punch:

See also

References

  • Robert Hendrickson, 1997. Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins (New York:Facts on File)
  • a message board post quoting the above book
  • Richard A. Peterson and Roger M. Kern, "Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore" American Sociological Review 61.5 (October 1996), pp. 900-907. Extensive bibliography.

Further reading

  • Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy.
  • Eliot, T.S.. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace) 1949.
  • Lamont, Michèle and Marcel Fournier, editors. Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 1992. Includes Peter A. Richardson and Allen Simkus, "How musical taste groups mark occupational status groups" pp 152-68.
  • Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press) 1988.
  • Lynes, Russell. The Tastemakers (New York: Harper and Row) 1954.
  • Radway, Janice A. Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire.
  • Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middle-Brow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press) 1992.
  • Woolf, Virginia. Middlebrow, in The Death of the Moth and other essays.

 
Translations: Translations for: Highbrow

Dansk (Danish)
adj. - intellektuel, akademisk, åndssnob
n. - intellektuel, åndsaristokrat, åndssnob

Nederlands (Dutch)
(semi-)intel- lectueel, geleerd, klassiek, zweverig

Français (French)
adj. - intellectuel
n. - intellectuel

Deutsch (German)
n. - Intellektueller
adj. - intellektuell, hochgestochen

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - (καθομ.) κουλτουριάρης, διανοούμενος
adj. - διανοουμενίστικος, πολυσπούδαστος, κουλτουριάρικος, κουλτουριάρης

Italiano (Italian)
intellettuale

Português (Portuguese)
n. - pessoa (f) intelectual
adj. - intelectual

Русский (Russian)
человек, претендующий на интеллектуальность, далекий от жизни ученый, высокомерный

Español (Spanish)
adj. - intelectual
n. - intelectual

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - intellektuell, intelligenssnobb, kultursnobb
adj. - intellektuell, kulturell, snobbig, bildad

中文(简体) (Chinese (Simplified))
自炫博学的, 不切实际的, 知识分子的, 知识份子, 卖弄知识的人

中文(繁體) (Chinese (Traditional))
adj. - 自炫博學的, 不切實際的, 知識份子的
n. - 知識份子, 賣弄知識的人

한국어 (Korean)
adj. - 지식인의, 지식인인 체하는
n. - 지식인, 교양인, 지식인인 체하는 사람

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 知識人, インテリ, インテリぶる人
adj. - 知識人の

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) الرفيع الثقافه أو الواسع العلم تستعمل على سبيل التهكم عادة (صفه) خاص بذوي الثقافه الرفيعه, رفيع الثقافه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
adj. - ‮ידען, משכיל‬
n. - ‮איש-רוח, סנוב‬


 
 

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Copyrights:

Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Thesaurus. Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary Copyright © 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Word Origin. America in So Many Words, by David K.Barnhart and Allan A. Metcalf. Copyright © 1997 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Highbrow" Read more
Translations. Copyright © 2007, WizCom Technologies Ltd. All rights reserved.  Read more

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