Word: highbrow
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James M. Cain, concocter of literary 20-minute eggs (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce), settled down in New Orleans to write another novel, described book critics as "ex-police reporters gone highbrow ... simply weird in their ignorance." He complained that "all critics confuse themselves with God," and concluded that "the confusion is unjustified...
Does a high brow necessarily make its owner a highbrow? Anthropologists have long and solemnly argued the relative braininess of long-headed v. roundheaded men. Now, an anthropologist who deplores the whole argument - Dr. Franz Weidenreich of the American Museum of Natural History-contends that they have been wasting their time. In a well-documented report in the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, he offers a convincing case against the prevailing notion that a long head (or a high brow) denotes a superior brain. Intelligence, he concludes flatly, has nothing to do with the shape of the head...
General Joseph Stilwell, asked by some visiting publishers on Okinawa what he thought the average G.I.'s war aims were, obliged by writing an (813-word) imaginary dialogue between a "Highbrow and a G.I." Asked about "the ideology behind the action," the G.I. responds: "The war started, and we got drafted, and here we are." Pressed further, General Joe's G.I. tells the Highbrow off: "You are looking for something so natural that nobody thinks of naming...
...Harvard ink-stained young La Farge lost his nickname at last, was president of the highbrow Advocate and edited the lusty Lampoon. When he was 28 his first novel won the Pulitzer Prize. But the name "Bop" still haunted him. It was not until he was 36 that a "woman of unusual quality, great perception and remorseless persistence" forced the hated word across his unwilling lips. "Then," he writes, "and only then, I ceased to be afraid, and then at last I slew the Groton...
...road performances in open-air stadiums where the potential box office exceeds $10,000. (Just to be on the safe side, he also took in as business partner Y. D. Scales, a Fort Worth auto dealer, whose daughter, pert Kathryn Lee, a musicomedy dancer, wanted to be a highbrow ballerina.) Said Massine, flushed with the opening success of Highlights: "My conception of repertoire is the same as that of chamber music in relation to symphony. ... I feel I am restoring some of the basic elements of Russian ballet. . . . Today ballet has become, with big companies, a kind of musical comedy...