What are some examples of lowbrow?
Comedies that rely heavily on insults, physical gags, and jokes about bodily functions can usually be described as lowbrow. Forms of entertainment such as operas and Shakespearean plays are typically regarded as highbrow — the opposite of lowbrow. Surprisingly, they can have their fair share of lowbrow humor as well.
What does the expression lowbrow mean?
Definition of lowbrow : of, relating to, or suitable for a person with little taste or intellectual interest a lowbrow horror movie.
What is highbrow and lowbrow?
Anything highbrow is usually intellectual in nature, and people who appreciate such things are also called highbrows. Highbrows usually have money and are sometimes considered snobby or hoity-toity. The opposite of highbrow is lowbrow, which refers to vulgar and less sophisticated culture and people.
What is lowbrow culture?
Lowbrow, or lowbrow art, is an underground visual art movement that arose in the Los Angeles, California area in the late 1960s. It is a populist art movement with its cultural roots in underground comix, punk music, tiki culture, graffiti, and hot-rod cultures of the street.
What is lowbrow literature?
In lowbrow books, the writer dictates the reader’s experience. Nothing is implied, everything is explained. The reader’s engagement with lowbrow books is one of passive consumerism, and this is why it can be pleasurable. You don’t have to do anything. It’s the literary equivalent of a pony-ride at a fair.
How do you use lowbrow in a sentence?
1) He has very lowbrow tastes. 2) I like a lowbrow action movie once in a while. 3) It was pleasant enough: a bit too lowbrow for my cynical taste, but no matter. 4) Lowbrow tabloid readers gave PEBs high ratings for all three purposes.
What is highbrow lowbrow and Middlebrow?
The opposite of highbrow is lowbrow, and between them is middlebrow, describing culture that is neither high nor low; as a usage, middlebrow is derogatory, as in Virginia Woolf’s unsent letter to the New Statesman, written in the 1930s and published in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942).
Where did the term lowbrow originate?
The terms “highbrow” and “lowbrow” come from phrenology, the nineteenth-century science of regarding the shape of the skull as a key to intelligence. A “high” forehead meant intelligence; a “low” one—not so much. However, this so-called “science” led to notable episodes of racism and prejudice.
Where did the term lowbrow come from?
Is lowbrow an insult?
Lowbrow is, basically, an insult; it is applied to a person who is felt (by highbrow people) to have little or no taste.
What is the synonym of lowbrow?
1’a lowbrow action movie’ mass-market, tabloid, pop, popular, intellectually undemanding, lightweight, easy to understand, accessible, unpretentious, simple, simplistic. downmarket, uncultured, unsophisticated, trashy, philistine, plebeian, cheap. informal dumbed-down. British informal rubbishy.
Is lowbrow a metaphor?
Highbrow and lowbrow are compound words that are idioms. We will examine the meaning of the common idioms highbrow and lowbrow, where they came from, and some examples of their idiomatic usage in sentences. Highbrow means academic, scholarly, high class; for some it may mean pretentious.
Where does the term lowbrow come from?
Etymology. A bahuvrihi compound of low + brow, Americanism, circa 1902. Refers to the (by that time discredited) pseudoscience of phrenology, which suggested that a person of low intelligence and sophistication would possess a lower brow-line than someone of greater intelligence and sophistication.
What’s another word for trashy?
What is another word for trashy?
| unfashionable | tacky |
|---|---|
| unstylish | tasteless |
| cheesy | styleless |
| dowdy | inelegant |
| ticky-tack | ticky-tacky |
What does socially unsophisticated mean?
b(1) : not worldly-wise : lacking social or economic sophistication.
What is another word for lower class?
In this page you can discover 19 synonyms, antonyms, idiomatic expressions, and related words for lower-class, like: lowlife, commonalty, hoi polloi, lower orders, lower ranks, masses, other-half, plebeians, plebs, proletariat and rank-and-file.
What’s another word for classless?
Synonyms & Antonyms of classless
- boorish,
- churlish,
- cloddish,
- clownish,
- loutish,
- uncouth.
What does it mean to be inexperienced?
Definition of inexperience 1 : lack of practical experience. 2 : lack of knowledge of the ways of the world.
What is a low class person?
noun. a class of people below the middle class, having the lowest social rank or standing due to low income, lack of skills or education, and the like.
What does it mean to be a high-brow learner?
My edition of Webster’s New Riverside Dictionary has this entry for ‘high-brow’: “One who has or affects superior learning or culture.” And for ‘low-brow’: “One having uncultivated tastes.”
What does ‘low-brow’ mean?
And for ‘low-brow’: “One having uncultivated tastes.” The dictionary tells us that each of these definitions is ‘informal’, suggesting that variation is likely within the compass of the given definition and that the accepted usage is uncommonly influenced by variant impressions and preconceptions.
What is the operational criterion for high-brow identification?
Remember ‘high-brow’? It was predicated on raised brows. At the time the word was coined the operational criterion was evidence of the raised brow in a circumstance that would allow it to send a message that the average person would unfailingly identify, all of which is sufficient for operational purposes.
Is there such a thing as ‘high-brow’ blindness?
Meaning, that what we have commonly accepted as ‘high-brow’, by whatever combination of meanings, we have to presume the extreme likelihood of dismissive blindness. It need not, indeed should not, disqualify from inclusion as ‘high-brow’.