The Devil's Dictionary

Tom Wolfe in the new National Review (requires subscription):

I hasten to point out the difference between an intellectual and a person of intellectual achievement. An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others. When Noam Chomsky was merely the most original, arresting, and widely talked-about linguistic theorist in America, he was never referred to as a leading American intellectual. That came only after he expressed his outrage over American involvement in the war in Vietnam, about which he knew nothing, since he read The Nation instead of Parade. It was the outrage that gained him entry into that “charming aristocracy,” to borrow the words of Catulle Mendès. Or as Marshall McLuhan once put it, “Moral indignation is a standard strategy for endowing the idiot with dignity.”