clerisy •
\KLAIR-uh-see\ • noun: intellectuals who form an artistic, social, or
political vanguard or elite: intelligentsia
Examples:
The book's
author claims that a successful society must have both a strong commitment to
democratic ideals and a well-established clerisy.
"The situation was
so dire that it required nothing less than scientific experts freed from
constitutional strictures to run the government and the elevation of
intellectuals and artists to the status of a new cultural clerisy." —
Daniel DiSalvo, The Washington Times, February 18, 2014
Did you know? English
philosopher-poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) believed that if humanity
was to flourish, it was necessary to create a secular organization of learned
individuals, "whether poets, or philosophers, or scholars" to
"diffuse through the whole community … that quantity and quality of
knowledge which was indispensable." Coleridge named this hypothetical
group the clerisy, a term he adapted from Klerisei, a German word for clergy
(in preference, it seems, to the Russian term intelligentsia which we borrowed
later, in the early 1900s). Coleridge may have equated clerisy with an old
sense of clergy meaning "learning" or "knowledge," which by
his time was used only in the proverb "an ounce of mother wit is worth a
pound of clergy."
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