clerisy

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The Word of the Day for May 2 is: 

clerisy   \KLEH-ruh-see\   noun
     : intelligentsia

Example sentence:
     "Brinkley's book [_Washington Goes to War_] is history 
rescued from the sterility of the academic clerisy and made 
accessible to the general reader." (George F. Will, _St. 
Petersburg Times_, April 14, 1988)

Did you know?
     English philosopher-poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-
1834) believed that if humanity was to flourish, it was 
necessary to create a secular organization of learned 
individuals, "whether poets, or philosophers, or scholars" 
to "diffuse through the whole community . . . that quantity and 
quality of knowledge which was indispensable." Coleridge named 
this hypothetical group the "clerisy," a term he adapted 
from "Klerisei," a German word for "clergy"  (in preference, it 
seems, to the Russian term "intelligentsia" which we borrowed 
later, in the early 1900s). Coleridge may have equated "clerisy" 
with an old sense of "clergy" meaning "learning" or "knowledge," 
which by his time was used only in the proverb "an ounce of 
mother wit is worth a pound of clergy."