Egghead

[1] The term egghead reached its peak currency during the 1950s, when vice-presidential candidate Richard Nixon used it against Democratic Presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson.

"[2] In his Pulitzer Prize-winning historical essay on U.S. anti-intellectualism, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote: "During the campaign of 1952, the country seemed to be in need of some term to express that disdain for intellectuals which had by then become a self-conscious motif in U.S. politics.

The word egghead was originally used without invidious associations, but quickly assumed them, and acquired a much sharper tone than the traditional highbrow.

"The recent election," Bromfield remarked, "demonstrated a number of things, not the least of them being the extreme remoteness of the 'egghead' from the thought and feeling of the whole of the people"In their Dictionary of American Slang (1960; 2nd supplemented ed.

Philip K. Dick claimed in a 1977 interview that, while researching his Nazi-themed novel The Man in the High Castle, he discovered that an equivalent term (Eierkopf) had been used by the Sturmabteilung because "when they attacked people who were defenseless, [...] their skulls cracked readily against the pavement".