英语词汇highbrow的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

highbrow; supercilious. Dr. Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), founder of the “science” of phrenology, gave support to the old folk notion that people with big foreheads have more brains. Gall’s lifelong studies purportedly showed that the bigger a person’s forehead was, the higher his brow, the smarter he would be. This theory was widely accepted through the 19th century, until phrenology was discredited by scientists, and the belief led to the expression highbrow for an intellectual, which is first recorded in 1875. The term is often used dispar- agingly and is the source of the similar terms lowbrow and middlebrow. Highbrowed people can be supercilious, meaning disdainful, and this word has a connection with the brow, too. Supercilious is from the Latin supercilium, “eyebrow,” and the Latin suffix-osus, “full of.” Thus a supercilious person is literal- ly one “full of eyebrow,” an etymology that goes well with the image of someone lifting the eyebrow slightly in disdain. New York Sun reporter Will Irvin popularized highbrow, and its op- posite lowbrow, in 1902, basing his creation on the wrongful notion that people with high foreheads have bigger brains and are more intelligent and intellectual than those with low fore- heads. At first the term was complimentary, but highbrow came to be at best a neutral word used to describe such things as highbrow books, and at worst sank as low as lowbrow, being used by lowbrows and other anti-intellectuals to describe su- percilious intellectuals or psuedo-intellectuals. Life magazine coined the term middlebrow in the mid-1940s. See also egghead.

词汇	highbrow
词源	highbrow; supercilious. Dr. Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), founder of the “science” of phrenology, gave support to the old folk notion that people with big foreheads have more brains. Gall’s lifelong studies purportedly showed that the bigger a person’s forehead was, the higher his brow, the smarter he would be. This theory was widely accepted through the 19th century, until phrenology was discredited by scientists, and the belief led to the expression highbrow for an intellectual, which is first recorded in 1875. The term is often used dispar- agingly and is the source of the similar terms lowbrow and middlebrow. Highbrowed people can be supercilious, meaning disdainful, and this word has a connection with the brow, too. Supercilious is from the Latin supercilium, “eyebrow,” and the Latin suffix-osus, “full of.” Thus a supercilious person is literal- ly one “full of eyebrow,” an etymology that goes well with the image of someone lifting the eyebrow slightly in disdain. New York Sun reporter Will Irvin popularized highbrow, and its op- posite lowbrow, in 1902, basing his creation on the wrongful notion that people with high foreheads have bigger brains and are more intelligent and intellectual than those with low fore- heads. At first the term was complimentary, but highbrow came to be at best a neutral word used to describe such things as highbrow books, and at worst sank as low as lowbrow, being used by lowbrows and other anti-intellectuals to describe su- percilious intellectuals or psuedo-intellectuals. Life magazine coined the term middlebrow in the mid-1940s. See also egghead.
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