As I was donning my faculty regalia for graduation a few weeks ago where I teach, one of the other faculty members asked for help with his doctoral cap because it was crooked. It has four points and the way he had it tilted, it made him look pointy-headed. I joked with him that maybe that’s where the term “pointy-headed intellectual” came from - professors wearing their academic caps with the points.
Ah yes, but the insult is, inevitably, being used by those who are not intellectuals, and who are thus too dumb to understand this.
Seriously, it is a stupid insult, that makes no damn sense, used by stupid people.
As applied to liberals rather than specifically to intellectuals, it is even more stupid: it is basically saying "“I despise liberals because they are smarter than I am.” As arguments against liberalism go, that is about as stupid as you could get.
Well, that’s kinda the nature of idioms. They don’t mean the sum of the literal components.
As Ronald Reagan once said, “The problem with our liberal friends isn’t that they are ignorant; it’s that they know so much that just isn’t so.”
And as William F. Buckley once said, “I’d sooner be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone directory than by the faculty of Harvard University.”
Conservatives don’t think ill of liberals because they think liberals are genuinely smarter than they are. Trust me.
The line is, of course, Mark Twain’s. As a wit, Reagan was both good and originial. Unfortunately, what was original wasn’t good, and what was good wasn’t original.
I always assumed that “pointy-headed” was just a derivation of “egg-headed” - both associated bald-headedness with being a liberal intellectual (with the point being your head supposedly rising above your hair). Being as the terms seem to originate in the early sixties, I assume the association was based on Adlai Stevenson, who was a famous bald-headed liberal intellectual in that period.
I am sure that is not the only reason why conservatives think ill of liberals, or the main one, or any sort of reason why smart conservative intellectuals (yes I believe they exist), or even you, think, ill of liberals, but conservatives (or any people, actually) who use this ridiculous insult are both displaying and reveling in their own dumbness (or else they are pandering to the dumber amongst their potential supporters).
Is it too late to change my answer? More than an year later, I don’t remember if I was serious, or if I was joking.
The last time I gave the question any thought, I thought the same thing as Little Nemo.
They were from France.
So it means either intellectual, or dumb. That just about covers it. :dubious: