This week’s theme
Words derived from body parts

This week’s words
tergiversate
loggerhead
hough
middlebrow
footloose

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(MID-uhl-brou)

MEANING:

adjective:	1. (describing a person) Having tastes and interests that lie somewhere between sophisticated and vulgar.
	2. (describing a work of art) Neither sophisticated nor vulgar.
noun:	A person who has conventional tastes and interests.

ETYMOLOGY:

Formed on the pattern of highbrow and lowbrow. From middle, from Old English middel (middle) + bru (brow). Earliest documented use: 1912.

NOTES:

In the grand, often ridiculous, opera of cultural tastes, highbrow is reserved for the stuff that makes you appear smart at dinner parties -- Shakespeare, who basically invented the plot twist, Mozart, whose music you pretend to understand, and Nabokov, who wrote books that double as vocabulary workouts. On the flip side, lowbrow is the guilty-pleasure aisle -- home to the Kardashians, who’ve made an empire out of... being Kardashians, superhero movies (because who needs subtlety when you have explosions), and kitsch art (the velvet Elvis paintings of the world).

What’s brow doing here? It comes from phrenology, a pseudoscience that claimed to tell about a person’s characteristics from the shape of their skull. Someone with a large forehead (highbrow) was considered intellectual. The origin of this classification should tell us all we need to know about dividing people into highbrow and lowbrow.

Also, consider that brows go up and down with time. Shakespeare is highbrow in modern times, but in his days Shakespeare was popular entertainment. Peasants and royalty, illiterates and intellectuals, they all enjoyed performances of his plays. It just goes to show, today’s pop culture may turn out to be tomorrow’s classic.

USAGE:

“Rebeck’s 100-minute tale of grief and release is the sort of middlebrow crowd-pleaser that used to be common fare.”
David Cote; Danny DeVito Hoards Laughter and Tears in “I Need That”; The New York Observer; Nov 2, 2023.

See more usage examples of middlebrow in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: