ARTY
(AHR-tee)
Showily
or affectedly artistic Common
clues:
Bohemian; Pretentious; Chichi; Dilettantish; Culturally showy;
Pseudosophisticated;
Too-too Crossword
puzzle frequency:
five times a year Frequency
in English language:
23127 / 86800 Video: Pretentious
Glasses
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
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It uses material from the Wikipedia
article "Highbrow".
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