trahison des clercs
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
25
Scrabble Score
17
Letters
2
Syllables
12
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A compromise of intellectual integrity by members of an intelligentsia.
Example Sentences
- "The age of the ‘experimental’ and the highbrow has helped to relegate poetry to a condition of irrelevance and triviality, and our collective self-commitment to cleverness and self-consciousness may ultimately (but by whom?) be seen as the profoundest of the twentieth century’s much-discussed trahisons des clercs."
Etymology
Borrowed from French trahison des clercs (literally “treason of the clerks”); originally adopted from the title of the French philosopher and novelist Julien Benda’s 1927 book, La Trahison des Clercs (whose first English translation bore the title The Betrayal of the Intellectuals). See too: "In 1927, the French essayist Julien Benda published his famous attack on the intellectual corruption of the age, La Trahison des Clercs. [He used] “clerc” in “the medieval sense,” i.e., to mean “scribe,” someone we would now call a member of the intelligentsia. Academics and journalists, pundits, moralists, and pontificators of all varieties are in this sense clercs. The “treason” in question was the betrayal by the “clerks” of their vocation as intellectuals."
Origin
- Source language: French