the.com/ivory tower
Where brilliant people go to think deeply and understand nothing about rent.
means A place or state of intellectual isolation where someone theorizes about life while being insulated from its practical, everyday problems.
from The phrase comes from the Biblical Song of Songs, where a woman's neck is praised as 'a tower of ivory' — pure poetic imagery. A 19th-century French literary critic, Sainte-Beuve, repurposed it to describe poets who withdrew from the messy world into private, rarefied artistic contemplation. The English translation 'ivory tower' stuck, and the phrase drifted from poets to academics generally — anyone perched high above the ground-level concerns of ordinary life, rent included.
- origin
- Biblical phrase describing a woman's neck, oddly
- 19th century shift
- poet Sainte-Beuve applied it to detached intellectuals
- modern use
- academics theorizing about problems they never personally face
- irony
- universities built it, then complained about public funding cuts