Highbrow
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 literature—i.e., literary fiction and poetry; to films in the arthouse line; and to comedy that requires significant understanding of analogies or references to appreciate. The term
highbrow is considered by some (with corresponding labels as 'middlebrow' 'lowbrow') as discriminatory or overly selective (Lawrence W. Levine, "Prologue",
Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, 1990: 3;
highbrow is currently distanced from the writer by quotation marks: "We thus focus on the consumption of two generally recognised 'highbrow' genres—opera and classical" (Tak Wing Chan,
Social Status and Cultural Consumption 2010: 60). The first usage in print of
highbrow was recorded in 1884.