brainish

English

Etymology

From brain +‎ -ish.

Adjective

brainish (comparative more brainish, superlative most brainish)

1. (obsolete) hot-headed; furious
   • c. 1599–1602 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act IV, scene i]:

     And, in this brainish apprehension, kills / The unseen good old man.

   • 1850, Aeschylus, translated by John Stuart Blackie, The Lyrical Dramas of Aeschylus, from the Greek, page 104:

     I had slain a man, Even thy sone, Amphidamas, whom, unwittingly of life I reft In a brainish moment, foolishly, when we quarrelled o'er the dice;

   • 1892, J.B. Bury, “The Insurrection of Women: A Criticism”, in The Fortnightly Review, volume 52, page 657:

     Solicitude for the interests of true womanhood has put the knights errant into such a state of "brainish apprehension," that they hasten to imagine all kinds of terrible catastrophes which could not possibly happen .

2. (obsolete) Purely the work of the imagination, without serious meaning.
   • 1613, Michael Drayton, Poems: by Michael Drayton, Esquire, page 161:

     For the third, because the worke might in truth be iudged brainish, if nothing but amorous humor were handled therein, I haue inter-wouen matters historicall, which unexplaned, might defraud the mind of much content, as for example, in Queene Margarites Epistle to William de-la-Poole.

   • 1836, John Ruskin, Marcolini:

     It is a folly–nothing, a mere thought, A brainish fancy.

   • 1871, William Tennant, Anster Fair, page 4:

     I see– but fie, thou brainish Muse! what mean These vapourings, and brags of what by thee is seen?

3. Cerebral; intellectual rather than physical or emotional.
   • 1834, Henry Taylor, Philip van Artevelde; a Dramatic Romance:

     That such existences there are, I know; For, whether by the corporal organ framed, Or painted by a brainish fantasy Upon the inner sense, not once nor twice, But sundry times, have I beheld such things Since my tenth year, and most in this last past.

   • 1849, John Bale, The First Examination of the Worthy Servant of God, Mistress Anne Askewe:

     Will ye still pluck our christian belief from the right hand of God, the eternal Father, and send it to a box of your brainish devising ?

   • 1894, Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You:

     And in all this PRINCESS MARYA ALEXEVNA is perfectly right and plays the true prophet, unless these young people who are getting married have another purpose, their one and only one, unknown to PRINCESS MARYA ALEXEVNA, and that not a brainish purpose, not one recognized by the intellect, but one that gives life its color and the attainment of which is more moving than any other.

   • 1970, Norman Foerster, American Poetry and Prose, page 84:

     Brainish discourses talk only with the understanding, they go no further, because they rise no deeper then from the understanding of him that speaks.

   • 1995, Philosophical Topics - Volume 22, page 56:

     He needs to posit only one microjudgment because he is much more liberal with the content he is prepared to give that judgment: "There is no upper bound on the 'amount of content' in a single proposition, so a single, swift, righ, 'propositional episode' might (for all philosophical theory tells us) have so much content, in its brainish, non-sentential way, that an army of Prousts might fail to express it exhaustively in a library of volumes” ( “ Living on the Edge , ” 150 ) .

   • 2006, Michael J. Colacurcio, Godly Letters: The Literature of the American Puritans:

     Conventionally, "he that mourns in speaking of sin, makes another mourn for sin committed" because, more generally, and with a little more élan, “an exhortation that proceeds from the heart carries an authority and commission with it,” whereas “brainish discourses talk only with the understanding".

   • 2013, Michael Curran, Sentences:

     The coarsest sensualists are in thrall more to their brainish fantasies than to their carnal appetites.

   • 2017, Patrick Sheil, Kierkegaard and Levinas: The Subjunctive Mood:

     So in mistaking an ice-cream van for an ambulance, the perception of an ambulance does not belong only to '... brainish apprehension' or, rather, the fact that it is brainish does not prevent it from being an apprehension .

4. Intellectual; highly intelligent.
   • 1959, Compton Mackenzie, The Lunatic Republic, page 202:

     I think we shall win. Pig 22, who is the first pusher for those who wish to abolish forks, is a highly lunatised and brainish wug.

   • 1960 May, Hilbert Schenck Jr., “Wockyjabber”, in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction:

     "Oh, has thou solved the integral? Here is a raise, my brainish boy!" He threw his time cards in the air And clapped his hands with joy.

   • 2012, You-sheng Chen, LunYu - Confucian Analects in Chinese & English:

     Brainish men are ambitious and incapable, while discreet men are timid and excessively conservative.

5. Neurological; concerning the brain and nervous system.
   • 1967, Charles Frederick Presley, The Identity Theory of Mind, page 21:

     According to them, any genuine entities or processes of which we may speak in mentalistic terms may be (as Place holds) and very probably are (as Smart holds) just physiological ones of a neural or brainish sort .

   • 1992, New Scientist - Volume 134, page 48:

     In the early days of the cognitive revolution against the reigning ideas of behaviourism, the brainish beginnings of the movement – in the work of such pioneers as Norbert Wiener and WarrenMcCulloch– were swept aside by an ideology that called for ever higher levels of abstraction.

6. Brain-like.
   • 2016, Mary Bell, Shan Gao, Quantum Nonlocality and Reality: 50 Years of Bell's Theorem, page 214:

     That is, his beliefs about the physical world (including, I think it must be admitted, even the belief that conscious experience can only emerge, somehow, from an appropriately brainish sort of physical object) are entirely arbitrary.

Anagrams

• bairnish