highbrow

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highbrow

1. adjective Of or pertaining to heightened intellectualism or superior learning or culture; especially erudite or sophisticated; appealing or suited to highbrows. The film is by no means highbrow, but it has an intelligent enough story and some compelling characters. After two degrees in literature, Stanley insists on reading only highbrow books. No highbrow shows tonight—I just want something that will make me laugh!

2. noun A person who has or affects heightened intellectualism or superior learning or culture, often in a pretentious or elitist manner. Of course, a book like this won't be given the time of day by literary highbrows, but it nevertheless provides an engaging and—dare I say it—entertaining read. Geez, Stanley's become quite the highbrow now that he has two degrees in literature. Yeah, Marcy's brilliant, but she's no highbrow—she's really down to earth and easy to talk to.

highbrowed

Of or pertaining to heightened intellectualism or superior learning or culture; especially erudite or sophisticated; appealing or suited to highbrows. The film is by no means highbrowed, but it has an intelligent enough story and some compelling characters. After two degrees in literature, Stanley insists on reading only highbrowed books. No highbrowed shows tonight—I just want something that will make me laugh!

highbrow

1. n. an intellectual person; a person with refined tastes. (see also longhair.) The highbrows usually congregate in there.

2. mod. having to do with an intellectual or a person with refined tastes. Pete is sort of highbrow, but he’s an okay guy.

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References in periodicals archive ?

Tanner, Asbridge, and Wortley (2008), analyzing musical taste among teenagers in Toronto, quantify cultural capital by creating an additive index using participation scores in traditionally highbrow activities; they find that it has a significant and substantial effect in predicting membership in the group of musical omnivores.

The Stratification of Attendance at Cultural Activities in Canada

As a result, in 1875 "highbrow" became a synonym for intellectual.

The Inscrutable Mystery of Faces

VENICE: Highbrow trumped Hollywood at the Venice film festival this year, with Russian director Alexander Sokurov's demanding German-language "Faust" taking top prize while Roman Polanski and George Clooney were overlooked.Most prizes at Saturday's closing ceremony went to less-than-familiar names and faces, with the exception of rising Irish star Michael Fassbender's best actor award for "Shame."

Highbrow trumps Hollywood at this year's Venice film festival

In his proposed book, Sousa's Washington, Warfield intends to document and illuminate the interconnectedness between black and white, highbrow and lowbrow, professional and amateur, and military and civilian musicians, through a detailed investigation of the early career of John Philip Sousa.

The Adrienne Fried Block Award Winner: Patrick Warfield

Bourdieu used correspondence analysis techniques applied to survey data to uncover a variety of highbrow and lowbrow cultural forms and ways of appreciating them that, he argued, served to delimit and sustain class boundaries.

Culture and class in Canada

"Playwrights in pursuit of cultural and symbolic capital dismissed jazz as a low-class, immoral, mass-produced form," Sarvan says, adding that jazz "thereby served as the practice on which an emergent, would-be highbrow, literary theatre looked with horror, in part because it was providing the substance and style for vaudeville and musical comedy." Appropriations of jazz by such composers as George Gershwin, Jerome Kern and George Antheil irritated upper-class elites and conservative thinkers whose critical writings policed sacred boundaries in an effort to elevate the drama and redefine it as a branch of literature.

The Invention of American Drama: Looking across the Jazz Age, three case studies track the birth of a legitimate stage

Is one not allowed to play opera for audience amusement, must it always be so highbrow that the man in the street will be excluded?

Fun approach brings opera to the masses; AGENDA & LETTERS

"New York Nights: Writing, Producing, and Performing in Gotham" explores the career and life of Nick Catalano, a man who has worked with countless comedians and musicians throughout his career from the highbrow works of Duke Ellington to the not-so-highbrow exploits of Jerry Seinfeld.

New York Nights

MELVYNB ragg has sometimes been a figure of fun - not least because of his Spitting Image puppet - but we shouldn't underestimate his contribution to arts and culture, both populist and highbrow.

Image puppet - but we shouldn't underestimate

The fans at Stockport County are a bit more highbrow than that, and they have launched groundforapound.com to try and inject funds.

Football: Boot room - Club away with pixels

HIGHBROW: Rafta Rafta, Birmingham Rep (January 31 to February 16)

33 REASONS TO VISIT BRUM; YOUR CUT-OUT-AND-KEEP GUIDE TO A YEAR OF CULTURE YOUR CUT-OUT-AND-KEEP GUIDE TO A YEAR OF CULTURE The Sunday Mercury's revelation that Birmingham had been overlooked in an official guide to Britain's big cultural events this year sparked a storm of indignation. Travel Editor PAUL COLE and Marketing Birmingham's KATE ECCLES offer a culture calendar

Shyon Baumann, a sociologist at the University of Toronto, traces this shift in Hollywood Highbrow, a swift, absorbing academic study of "the acceptance of Hollywood films as art among a large segment of the public, particularly (though not exclusively) those with postsecondary education." His argument isn't that movies have improved--the works of There Will Be Blood director P.

Vanity projects

Since Robyn Archer ended her brief reign and returned to tend her sick mother Down Under we keep hearing talk of "highbrow".