pseudo-intellectualadj.n.

1880 Harper's Mag. Nov. 936/1 The two phases of the past may be designated as the first, or material, and the intermediate, or pseudo-intellectual phase.

1899 Living Age 21 Jan. 161/1 When we think of the subtleties of the pseudo-intellectual drama, unintelligible and valueless to the unsophisticated imagination, we hail the public as a friend.

1944 A. Koestler in Horizon Mar. 173 The pseudo-intellectual hangers-on whose primary motive is..neurosis pure and simple.

1956 A. S. C. Ross in M. Black Importance of Lang. (1962) 99 To say Miss Austen instead of Jane Austen is either precious or pseudo-intellectual.

1995 N.Y. Rev. Bks. 22 June 7/4 He was just another one of those mouthy sea lawyers full of pseudo-intellectual yammer about their far-out politics.

2000 Vanity Fair (N.Y.) May 86/1 Tom Buchanan [sc. in the Great Gatsby] is a prefiguration of the ugly pseudo-scientific and pseudo-intellectual types who would mutate into Fascism over the horizon of 1929.

1922 Bridgeport (Connecticut) Telegram 30 June 15/1 The busy enemies of civilization—Reds, parlor-socialists, enemy-aliens, terrorists, Bolsheviki, pseudo-intellectuals.

1945 Ld. Vansittart Bones Contention ix. 76 A small and perverse breed of our pseudo-intellectuals, who have been cravenly pro-German and sourly anti-British.

1977 P. Johnson Enemies of Society xvi. 218 The fatuous Mary Wimbush, the pseudo-intellectual.

1994 Maclean's 7 Nov. 71/1 The setting is the Roaring Twenties, and the pseudo-intellectuals are struggling Greenwich Village playwrights, not well-heeled, uptown literati.