The Middle-Brow
This
week I stumbled upon the sort of quote that tickles the fancy of a word nerd.
It comes from a 1912 article in The Nation.
“[T]here is an alarmingly wide chasm, I might almost say a vacuum,
between the high-brow, who considers reading either as a trade or as a form of
intellectual wrestling, and the low-brow, who is merely seeking for gross
thrills. It is to be hoped that culture will soon be democratized through some
less conventional system of education, giving rise to a new type that might be
called the middle-brow, who will
consider books as a source of intellectual enjoyment.”
The
quote sparked not only a good laugh, but an interest in the origins of the word
brow.
It seems the Old English braew initially meant blinker or twinkle, and was used to
refer to the eyelid or eyelashes. Its early relatives can be found in brus
(proto-Germanic), bhrus (Sanskrit), ophris (Greek), bruvis (Lithuanian),
& the Old Irish word bru.
To refer to what today is called the eyebrow, the
Anglo-Saxons combined bru with a prefix
meaning over, to create the term ofer-bru,
but somewhere in the 1200s the prefix evaporated and the prefixless bru or brouw
came to mean eyebrow. It wasn’t until the 1500s that the word brow
came to be used to refer to the forehead.
The
term browbeat
showed up in the late 1500s, though it appears that 16th century browbeating
had more to do with frowning, or lowering one’s brows than with any sort of
attack.
The
terms low-brow & high-brow didn’t come about until
1902, a mere decade before the coinage of that beautiful term labeling those of
us who consider books “a source of intellectual enjoyment,” middle-brow.
So,
fellow book-lovers, will any of you join me in proudly wearing the label, middle-brow?
Please let me know. We‘ll start a movement!