Time to learn something!
1. Go to Wikipedia.
2. Click on "Random article" in the left-hand sidebar box.
3. Post it!
Whee, I got a word:
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 first usage in print of highbrow was recorded in 1884. The opposite of highbrow is lowbrow, and between them is middlebrow, describing culture that is neither high nor low; as a usage, middlebrow can be 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 is sort of apropos, with all the mud-slinging about how Obama is such an elitist because he's black and owns just one house and car, whereas McCain is white and richer than God.... Oh wait, that doesn't make sense, does it?
Barack Obama: ONE car, ONE spouse, ONE house.
John McCain: ... where's my calculator?
;-)
Posted by: GB | September 24, 2008 at 09:44 PM