Sorry, were you talking to me? I was listening to a smart, stylish and talented musician with good politics who scores popular successes with a multi-faceted effort that explains to millions how the worse than working poor try to live. Yeah, something must be wrong with me ;-).
Smart, stylish, etc, in case it isn't obvious are relative. Which goes back to your point about middle-brow bravado or bluster or whatever it was. Bluster is needed only when one feels intimidated. When your son listens to his Baa Baa Sheep, he just listens to it because he likes it.
I think I have told this story before: one of my first experiences in grad school was a faculty and research assistants dinner where a faculty member (or his/her spouse, I don't recall) corrected a FOB (fresh off the boat) Indian kid's pronunciation of some word (I saw the same thing happen elsewhere in school also). Fortunately, his advisor who was British was standing nearby and with typical British wit suggested that the Indian kid had the pronunciation down closer than she/he did. By the time I got around to the point of reading Bloom's idea of the Canon, I was on to the game. And now you have supplied a term that describes it: high brow bluster!
--ravi