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Tuesday January 19, 2010

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clerisy [KLER-uh-see]

noun

1. The well educated class or intellectual elite; the intelligentsia.

• Some climate scientists compound their delusions of intellectual adequacy with messiah complexes. They seem to suppose themselves a small clerisy entrusted with the most urgent truth ever discovered. On it, and hence on them, the planet's fate depends.
  George F Will, "The climate-change travesty", The Washington Post, Dec 6, 2009
• While most of the words in "The Gilded Tongue" have fallen into disuse, the subdolous (crafty, cunning, artful) reader will find this book an excellent tool with which to impress the clerisy (the well educated or learned class; the literati; the intellegentsia) and frustrate the boeotian (marked by stupidity and philistinism) varlets (a low, unprincipled person; a rascal) they encounter.
  Jim Busch, "'Gilded Tongue' will have you speaking archaically", Tribune - Review / Pittsburgh Tribune - Review, Nov 26, 2006
• The scholar is the man of the ages, but he must also wish, with other men, to stand well with his contemporaries. But there is a certain ridicule, among superficial people, thrown on the scholars or clerisy, which is of no import, unless the scholars heed it.
  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882) An American essayist, philosopher, and poet. Representative Men (1850)

Origin of the Word

Clerisy, approximately 1620, derives from German Klerisei, "clergy," from Medieval Latin clericia, from Late Latin clericus, "a priest," from Late Greek klerikos, "of the clergy."