Word of the Day
ARTY (AHR-tee)
Showily or affectedly artistic
Common clues: Highbrow; Overly stylish; Pretentiously cultured; Showily imitative; Bohemian
Crossword puzzle frequency: once a year
Frequency in English language: 23127 / 86800
News: 2008: An arty view
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. "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. As the former buzzword has lost some currency and sounds slightly passé, its use now gives an impression of mild irony.
The
word (highbrow) draws its metonymy from the pseudoscience of
phrenology, and was originally simply a physical descriptor.
The first usage in print of highbrow was recorded in 1884. [1] 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.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Highbrow".
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