highbrow
American Heritage Dictionary:
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high·brow
(hī'brou') 
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.
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.
Roget's Thesaurus:
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highbrow
adjective
- Appealing to or engaging the intellect: cerebral, intellectual, sophisticated, thoughtful. See thoughts.
Houghton Mifflin Word Origins:
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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.
Random House Word Menu:
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categories related to 'highbrow'
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Highbrow
For the Transformers Headmaster character, see Highbrow (Transformers).
Used colloquially 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. [1] "Highbrow" can be applied to music, implying most of the classical music tradition and literature, i.e. literary fiction and poetry; to films in the arthouse line; and to comedy that requires significant understanding of analogies or references to appreciate. The term highbrow is considered by some (with corresponding labels as 'middlebrow' 'lowbrow') as discriminatory or overly selective (Lawrence W. Levine, "Prologue", Highbrow/lowbrow: the emergence of cultural hierarchy in America, 1990:3; highbrow is currently distanced from the writer by quotation marks: "We thus focus on the consumption of two generally recognised 'highbrow' genres— - opera and classical" (Tak Wing Chan, Social Status and Cultural Consumption 2010:60). The first usage in print of highbrow was recorded in 1884.[2] The term was popularized in 1902 by Will Irvin, a reporter for The Sun who adhered to the phrenological notion of more intelligent people having high foreheads.[3] The opposite of highbrow is lowbrow, and between them is middlebrow, describing culture that is neither high nor low; as a usage, middlebrow is derogatory, as in Virginia Woolf's unsent letter to the New Statesman, written in the 1930s and published in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word middlebrow first appeared in print in 1925, in Punch: "The BBC claims to have discovered a new type — 'the middlebrow'. It consists of people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff that they ought to like".[4] It was popularized by the American writer and poet Margaret Widdemer, whose essay "Message and Middlebrow" appeared in the Review of Literature in 1933. The three genres of fiction, as American readers approached them in the 1950s and as obscenity law differentially judged them, are the subject of Ruth Pirsig Wood, Lolita in Peyton Place: Highbrow, Middlebrow, and Lowbrow Novels, 1995.
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Contents
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See also
- Bildung
- Classics
- Cultural capital
- General knowledge
- Status–income disequilibrium
- Achieved status
- Bildungsbürgertum
- Egghead
- Bluestocking
- Lowbrow
Notes
- ^ Hendrickson, Robert (1997). Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins. New York: Facts on File. "Dr. Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), founder of the 'science' of phrenology, gave support to the old folk notion that people with big foreheads have more brains. The theory, later discredited, led to the expression 'highbrow' for an intellectual, which is first recorded in 1875."
- ^ "Highbrow". Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. 3rd ed. 2001.
- ^ Hendrickson, Robert (1997). Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins. New York: Facts on File. "New York Sun reporter Will Irvin popularized 'highbrow,' and its opposite 'lowbrow' in 1902, basing his creation on the wrongful notion that people with high foreheads have bigger brains and are more intelligent and intellectual than those with low foreheads. At first the term was complimentary, but 'highbrow' came to be at best a neutral word."
- ^ Quoted in Micki McGee, Yaddo: Making American Culture, :106: McGee outlines the history of the highbrow/lowbrow debate.
References
- 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.
- Swirski, Peter. From Lowbrow to Nobrow. Montreal, London: McGill-Queen's University Press 2005
- Woolf, Virginia. Middlebrow, in The Death of the Moth and other essays.
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
Translations:
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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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The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary Copyright © 1995 byHoughton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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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.
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Mentioned in
Matthews, Brander
(Quotes By)
I Never Promised You an Olive Garden: Will & Grace (TV Episode)
(1999 Comedy TV Episode)
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