middlebrow

middlebrow

Neither particularly intelligent and refined nor particularly uncultured or crude in style, content, or quality. I used to pride myself on my refined tastes when I was in college, but they've become positively middlebrow since I settled down as an adult. It's an inoffensive, middlebrow film aimed at middle-class parents in need of a few hours' distraction.
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

middlebrow

mod. middle-class; average or mediocre. (Between highbrow and lowbrow.) She has average middlebrow tastes and drives a midsized Chevrolet.
McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions
See also:
  • goober grabber
  • goober-grabber
  • grabber
  • grabbers
  • DYJHI
  • DYJHIW
  • Are you allergic to any medications?
  • get torqued off
  • growler
  • get (one's) rocks off on (something)
References in periodicals archive
He had high praise for Norman Mailer, whose work in the 1950s was often just a faux existentialist, "hipster" version of precisely the middlebrow trash that Macdonald dismissed.
Ultimately, this middlebrow sexual palate was a function of audiences that skewed heavily upscale and female (Mair 6, Juffer 200-204).
objects of their laughter, as well as the need to reform and improve the character of that relationship." (40) It is unfortunate that Stetz's model of feminist humor has not gained much attention in the field, because she is articulating a consumption-sensitive model of feminism that corresponds with Mangum's "middlebrow feminism": New Woman humorists produced literature designed to conciliate and appeal to a broad range of readers as prospective partners in the social change they envisioned.
But perhaps most critically, a newly emerging cultural space, the religious middlebrow, simply made writings on mysticism much more widely available.
While Random House published and defended legal attacks on James Joyce's Ulysses, Simon and Schuster made a fortune publishing cross-word-puzzle books and middlebrow bestsellers.
Plumpp readily admits academia's focus would prefer interest in more highbrow and middlebrow authors.
She provides careful close readings of this development in American "mainstream" or "middlebrow" culture through novels by John Updike, Philip Roth, James Dickey and Stephen King, through movies such as Misery, Deliverance and The Prince of Tides, and through polemical treatises by figures ranging from men's liberationist Warren Farrell to Allan Bloom and Dinesh D'Sousa, the perversely popular defenders of elite academicism.
For years, O'Donnell has been a champion of shallow, critically maligned, middlebrow entertainment, and what she lacks in sophistication and taste she more than makes up for with pluck.
Rarely does a work of cultural studies reveal the ambivalence toward its subject matter that characterizes Janice Radway's fascinating examination of the Book-of-the-Month Club, a mainstay of middlebrow taste since 1926.
In "Scent of a Woman's Ink," she distinguishes between Danielle Steele-type commercial fiction, "the mostly middlebrow books on which Oprah bestows her lucrative blessings," and prizeworthy literary fiction--"work that is tough-minded, challenging, eloquent, disquieting, and demanding of its readers." Prose adopts these criteria to rule out sentimentality (whether male or female) and to finesse the issue of scale (women composing domestic miniatures, men wrestling public monsters).
Although some elements of the literary establishment may pooh-pooh Coelho's writing, calling it trendy and middlebrow, the wide appeal of the author's earlier books demonstrates that he touches a chord in his readers.
'Dear Mr Bryan, I am sending this greeting from lovely Rio to let you know Emerson is fit and well and looking forward to returning to Middlebrow very soon.
These days, Cronenberg no longer draws outrage from the middlebrow arbiters of "good taste." His films are equally disturbing but seldom as viscerally off-putting as his earlier work, or perhaps we've all been jaded by the mediated, image-saturated culture his work presaged.
Horowitz's book, then, like recent scholarship of Joan Shelley Rubin and Janice Radway, revisits the complex issues attending "middlebrow" culture in twentieth-century America.(1) (By the same token, too, it touches on the problem of the "public intellectual.") Influenced by such scholarship, Horowitz has adopted an unusual strategy for exploring the cultural role that Packard's books played, and the territory they tried to occupy.
It took inspiration from the countryside and nature, and in the hands of less gifted poets, the resulting poetry was diluted and middlebrow conventional verse of late Romantic character.