Highbrow
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Highbrow is a colloquial synonym for intellectual or high culture, which draws its metonymy from the pseudoscience of phrenology. It 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. It is also used as a noun.
The first recorded usage of the word highbrow was in 1875.
The opposite of highbrow is lowbrow. The term middle-brow has been used to describe culture that was neither high nor low, as used derisively by Virginia Woolf in an unsent letter to the "New Statesman," written in the 1930's and published as a chapter in the book "The Death of a Moth and Other Essays" (1942).
See also
References
- [Re:highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow]
- Robert Hendrickson, 1997. Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins (New York:Facts on File)
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