chattering class

noun

disparaging

: people who talk and write a lot about current political and social matters regarded collectively especially as constituting an elitist class whose comments deserve to be dismissed or ignored

I have to be who I am, not who the chattering class thinks I am.

—Nancy Pelosi, quoted in Ms., Winter 2007

—usually plural

The late political columnist Alan Watkins coined the phrase "the chattering classes", by which he meant the metropolitan bien-pensants who decreed conventional views on the issues of the day.

—Simon Hoggart, The Guardian (London), 19 Mar. 2011

For the past couple of years, the chattering classes have argued about whether the religious right is in decline.

—Michelle Cottle, New Republic, 20 Mar. 2000

The world had confidence in the power of knowledge and reason, and people such as Ayer were not yet contemptuously dismissed as irrelevant, as economically and politically powerless, as "the chattering classes."

—Simon Blackburn, New Republic, 29 Jan. 2001

Word History

First Known Use

1900, in the meaning defined above

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