middle-browとは 意味・読み方・使い方

名詞

middle-brow (countable and uncountable, plural middle-brows)

1. Alternative form of middlebrow
   • 1949 April 11, “High Brow, Low-Brow, Middle-brow”, in LIFE, page 99:

     The high-brow would like to get rid of the middle-brow, but the middle-brow outnumbers him.

   • 1988, Isaac Rosenfeld, ‎Mark Shechner, Preserving the Hunger:, page 77:

     The criticism of society which proceeds from this direction is self-undermined, for it is full of the images, the rhythms, the poses, the easy values of the successful midle layer, the middle competence, the middle-brow.

   • 2012, Simon Stewart, Culture and the Middle Classes:

     However, most cultural intermediaries, those in charge of television and radio schedules and newspapers and magazines, are middle-brows, and yet have considerable means at their disposal.

語源

From middle +‎ brow, by analogy with highbrow and lowbrow. The term first appeared in Punch (1925) and was later used by Virginia Woolf (1930s) in an unsent letter to the New Statesman, published as a chapter in the book The Death of a Moth and Other Essays (1942).

形容詞

middlebrow (not comparable)

1. (derogatory) Neither highbrow or lowbrow, but somewhere in between.
   • 2000 September 21, Hal Foster, “Slumming with Rappers at the Roxy”, in London Review of Books‎, volume 22, number 18, →ISSN, archived from the original on 20 March 2025:

     What does a Princeton graduate whose old dream it was to write for the New Yorker do when that dream comes true, only to discover that his cherished magazine is no longer the middlebrow arbiter of high culture of his imagining, but just another media outlet frantic for its market share of mass culture?

   • 2017 September 29, “Winnie-the-Pooh brought joy to readers, but misery to the Milnes”, in The Economist‎, archived from the original on 8 August 2020:

     As in so many middlebrow period dramas, the vintage cars are too shiny, the clothes too smart, the upper-class accents too strained and the dialogue too contrived. However dark the plot becomes, the sun keeps shining brightly through the trees.

   • 2018 August 26, Jesse Green, “Neil Simon Drew Big Laughs, Then Came a Cultural Shift”, in The New York Times‎, archived from the original on 9 November 2020:

     In the late ’60s and early ’70s, as independent films were diversifying their outlook and shaking off the formulas of Hollywood storytelling, Broadway boulevard comedies like “Last of the Red Hot Lovers” and “California Suite” — tales of the befuddled nouveau riche in a new world — began to look mass-produced and middlebrow.

   • 2021 February 9, Christina Newland, “Is Tom Hanks part of a dying breed of genuine movie stars?”, in BBC‎, archived from the original on 30 March 2021:

     It's for this reason some regard Hanks with a sniffy attitude, seeing his middlebrow Hollywood fare as unfashionable (yes) and reactionary (no).

使用する際の注意点

• Generally pejorative, implying pretension and vulgarity, aspiring and appropriating high culture, but not appreciating it. On occasion, instead used positively.

派生語

名詞

middlebrow (plural middlebrows)

1. A person or thing that is neither highbrow nor lowbrow, but in between.

参考

• midcult
• midwit
• no-brow

参照

• ESC, 2003. Re:highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow, The Phrase finder.
• Robert Hendrickson, 1997. Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins (New York: Facts on File)

Further reading

• middlebrow on Wikipedia.Wikipedia