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22-442: Egghead is a happy looking wanderer who is traveling near an Arabian-like place, where he is lured to a prize machine. He sees a golden lamp but can't get it because another man wants it and is already using the machine. The man however lucks out and gets candy beans. He runs to the back corner in order to weep his sorrow away. Egghead sneaks up and tries his luck at getting the gold-lamp, and succeeds. He says, "Oh boy am I lucky". It

44-408: A noun or adjective , " highbrow " is synonymous with intellectual ; as an adjective, it also means elite , and generally carries a connotation of high culture . The term, first recorded in 1875, draws its metonymy from the pseudoscience of phrenology , which teaches that people with large foreheads are more intelligent. The term is deeply connected to hierarchical racial theories from

66-460: A little lamb". This doesn't impress the sultan and he opens a hatch and sends Ali falling into it. As several contenders enter including "Slap Happy Boys", Egghead emerges with the title, "Aladdin and his wonderful lamp". His lamp has been stolen and has been replaced. The minute the princess sees him, she falls madly in love. Egghead tries to please the king by performing the song " Bei Mir Bistu Shein ", but it only annoys him. Egghead tries to please

88-435: A professor or the protégé of a professor. Essentially confused in thought and immersed in mixture of sentimentality and violent evangelism. A doctrinaire supporter of Middle-European socialism as opposed to Greco-French-U.S. ideas of democracy and liberalism. Subject to the old-fashioned philosophical morality of Nietzsche which frequently leads him into jail or disgrace. A self-conscious prig, so given to examining all sides of

110-502: A question that he becomes thoroughly addled while remaining always in the same spot. An anemic bleeding heart. "The recent election," Bromfield remarked, "demonstrated a number of things, not the least of them being the extreme remoteness of the 'egghead' from the thought and feeling of the whole of the people" In their Dictionary of American Slang (1960; 2nd supplemented ed. 1975), Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner cite two earlier meanings of egghead , one referring to baldness,

132-463: A self-conscious motif in U.S. politics. The word egghead was originally used without invidious associations, but quickly assumed them, and acquired a much sharper tone than the traditional highbrow . Shortly after the campaign was over, Louis Bromfield , a popular novelist of right-wing political persuasion, suggested that the word might someday find its way into dictionaries as follows: Egghead: A person of spurious intellectual pretensions, often

154-408: A sign advertising that a man will be giving away his daughter hand in marriage by setting up a contest. Egghead then wishes for a magic carpet and one appears. He takes off to the "Royal Palace" and hopes to win the princess's hand in marriage, but finds that there is long line before him. The princess cries as two guards send in a tough-looking but dumb man named Ali-Baabe Breen, who repeats "Mary had

176-468: Is an epithet used to refer to intellectuals or people considered out-of-touch with ordinary people and lacking in realism, common sense, sexual interests, etc. on account of their intellectual interests. A similar, though not necessarily pejorative, British term is boffin . The term egghead reached its peak currency during the 1950s, when vice-presidential candidate Richard Nixon used it against Democratic Presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson . It

198-418: Is currently distanced from the writer by quotation marks: "We thus focus on the consumption of two generally recognised 'highbrow' genres—opera and classical". The first usage in print of highbrow was recorded in 1884. The term was popularized in 1902 by Will Irvin, a reporter for The Sun of New York City, who adhered to the phrenological notion of more intelligent people having high foreheads. Lowbrow

220-707: Is the opposite of highbrow , and between those brows is the middlebrow , which term describes the mediocre culture that has neither high expectations nor low expectations as culture. Usage of the term 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). According to the Oxford English Dictionary ,

242-484: Is the origin of the still common usage of 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow' ". "Highbrow" can be applied to music , implying most of the classical music tradition; to literature—i.e., literary fiction and poetry ; to films in the arthouse line; and to comedy that requires significant understanding of analogies or references to appreciate. The term highbrow is considered by some (with corresponding labels as 'middlebrow' 'lowbrow') as discerning or selective; and highbrow

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264-410: Is then revealed that the only he reason he got the lamp was because he mistakes it for a sugar bowl. He looks at the back of the lamp and it reads, "Rub Lamp 3 times". Egghead does so and a genie appears, which scares Egghead and he runs off; only for the genie to pull him right back. The genie then explains to him that he isn't, going to hurt him. He also explains to Egghead that he is now the master of

286-400: The 19th century. The German physician, physiologist , and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) argued "for human diversity alonglines of racial differences as evidenced by skulls shapes and measurements. [...] One metric of Blumenbachs classification was the line of the forehead, said to be higher among ' Caucasians ' and lower among 'Mongolians' and ' Ethiopians ' and this

308-464: 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. In spite of their wide-reaching differences, Virginia Woolf describes

330-536: The highbrow as intimately reliant on the lowbrow. For instance, she considers Prince Hamlet to be a highbrow lacking orientation in the world once he had lost the lowbrow Ophelia with her grip on earthly realities: this, she thought, explained why in general highbrows "honour so wholeheartedly and depend so completely upon those who are called lowbrows". It was popularized by the American writer and poet Margaret Widdemer , whose essay "Message and Middlebrow" appeared in

352-413: The lamp, and that if he ever needed anything all he needed to do was rub the lamp. Egghead asks for some, "Nice new clothes", and the genie responds by changing what he is wearing. This makes Egghead smile, and he thanks the genie. Hiding behind the corner is the same guy who previously ruined his chance to get the lamp. He claims that the lamp belongs to him and that he will get it. Meanwhile, Egghead sees

374-637: The man right out. He grabs the princess and takes off with her. At the end she decides to go with the Genie because he looks more attractive. On September 1, 1938, Motion Picture Exhibitor said, "Another Schlesinger laff-hit. The boy, who talks like Joe Penner , secures the magic lamp, has it stolen from him as he competes for the Caliph's daughter, wins her anyway, recovers the lamp for her real desires — a composite Robert Taylor , Clark Gable . It's all very funny." Egghead In U.S. English slang, egghead

396-417: The other to stupidity. Wentworth and Flexner note that the meaning under discussion here was "[p]op. during presidential campaign of 1952 when the supporters of Adlai Stevenson, Democratic candidate, were called eggheads. Thus orig. the term carried the connotation of 'politically minded' and 'liberal'; today its application is more general. May have originated in ref. to the high forehead of Mr. Stevenson or of

418-529: The pop. image of an academician" (p. 171). Philip K. Dick claimed in a 1977 interview that, while researching his Nazi-themed novel The Man in the High Castle , he discovered that an equivalent term ( Eierkopf ) had been used by the Sturmabteilung because "when they attacked people who were defenseless, [...] their skulls cracked readily against the pavement". Highbrow Used colloquially as

440-459: The sultan with his magic lamp, but his stupidity gets the better of him, and he doesn't realize that he doesn't have it any more. He claims that the lamp is crazy and is thrown out of the palace. He watches from the window. Inside the man who stole his lamp is trying to impress the king and thanks to his lamp is doing an incredible job. The Sultan declares a wedding and the horn is played, but Egghead arrives shouting, "I've been swindled" and knocks

462-508: The word middlebrow first appeared in print in 1925, in Punch : "The BBC claims to have discovered a new type—'the middlebrow'. It consists of people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff that they ought to like". The term had previously appeared in hyphenated form in The Nation , on 25 January 1912: [T]here is an alarmingly wide chasm, I might almost say a vacuum, between

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484-469: Was used by Bill Clinton advisor Paul Begala in the 2008 presidential campaign to describe Senator Barack Obama 's supporters when he said, "Obama can't win with just the eggheads and African-Americans." In his Pulitzer Prize -winning historical essay on U.S. anti-intellectualism, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote: "During the campaign of 1952, the country seemed to be in need of some term to express that disdain for intellectuals which had by then become

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