![]() I almost snorted with derisive laughter when a realtor touted a condo in my old neighborhood as being “walking distance to the thea-tah.” I call a spade a spade when it comes to overbearing, insufferably pretentious and dull movies like “The Remains of the Day.” On the lowbrow side: I can recite the entire ad copy of a Coast deodorant soap commercial from the ‘80s I watched “Star Wars” nine or ten times in the theater when it first came out, and again as an adult I can sing the theme song to “Gilligan’s Island.” I avoid listening to NPR (lest I find myself playing it in my Volvo while driving through Berkeley, which would render me a human cliché) in favor of FM 107.7, The Bone. I have been to a poetry reading, and I enjoyed it. Augustine, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Mikhail Lermontov in the original Latin, French, and Russian, respectively, and I know how to use the word “respectively.” I have enjoyed live theater performances of “Faust,” “Volpone,” and various Shakespeare plays. I hope to put both of these misgivings to rest.Īs far as my highbrow cred, I literally do have a fairly high brow, and as I get older and my hairline recedes, it’s only getting higher. On the other hand, since I often post really long essays to this blog, have a liberal arts degree, and pronounce “crêpe” to rhyme with “pep” rather than “scrape,” and since I actually bothered with the accent over the “ê” just now, you may consider me so far out of touch with the mainstream that I could never give lowbrow entertainment a fair shake. After all, since I’m an opera-hating jeans-wearing guy without a graduate degree, who likes all pizza-even frozen pizza-and can’t help but pronounce the name “Proust” to rhyme with “oust” instead of “boost,” you may question my authority in casting aspersions on the highest cultural realms our society can achieve. Naturally, before you spend any time reading this, you’ll want to satisfy yourself that I’m even in a position to comment. In this post I will use a pair of recent entertainments to examine the question of when and how we should choose one brow height over another. Thus you may be surprised, perhaps pleasantly so, that I also think it possible to embrace the highbrow too enthusiastically. highbrow entertainment I would always champion the latter. Widespread embrace of the vulgar is nothing new in fact, the word “vulgar” derives from the Latin word “vulgus” meaning “the common people.” You’re probably thinking, especially given my last sentence there, that in comparing lowbrow vs. Nobody needs to be encouraged to embrace lowbrow entertainment. Once a lowbrow quaff best known for the worm in its bottle, mezcal has become “this generation’s single-malt Scotch,” Robert Simonson writes in his compact and entertaining new volume, “Mezcal + Tequila Cocktails: Mixed Drinks for the Golden Age of Agave.NOTE: This post is rated R for adult themes and mild strong language. Her lover Aston (Trigorin), the cynically successful lowbrow writer, succumbing to the easy seduction of the innocent and dazzled Lily, is at least briefly brought to a realisation of love before (off-stage) finding its demands too taxing. “If you want fine-dining options to wow your highbrow guests, you’ve picked up the wrong book,” she writes. ( Guam Daily Post) People who had brows that were lower than average were thought to be stupid and inferior.įor something a little more highbrow, there’s the Browser, a smart British aggregator that draws on sources across the English-speaking world. The word lowbrow is also a closed compound word that was coined during the 1870s in reference to phrenology. Lowbrow means common, uneducated, for the masses, not requiring any intelligence or discrimination. The study of phrenology has been thoroughly debunked. People with brows that were higher than average were thought to be highly intelligent. Phrenology is the study of the shape of the head, which supposedly could measure a person’s intelligence. The word highbrow was coined during the 1870s and is related to phrenology. The word highbrow is a closed compound word, which is a word composed of two words joined together without a space that have a different meaning than the original words. Highbrow means academic, scholarly, high class for some it may mean pretentious.
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