October 4, 2002
The Obsolescence of the American Intellectual
The adjective "intellectual," obviously of Latin origin, appeared in English, occasionally but infrequently, for many centuries; but An Intellectual, as a noun, designating a recognizable type of man or woman, came into use only around 1884. (It is so dated in the Oxford English Dictionary; I found it more than once in George Gissing's New Grub Street, published in 1891, describing literary life in London of the 1880s.) In other languages, too, the usage of the noun does not seem to have
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