Clerisy:
[usually treated as plural] Learned or literary people regarded as a social group or class.
‘the clerisy are those who read for pleasure’[treated as singular] ‘he makes Coleridge’s ambitions for a clerisy exclusively conservative’ [Oxford English Dictionaries]
Noted in “Progressophobia: Why Things Are Better Than You Think They Are,” Steven Pinker, Skeptical Inquirer (May / June 2018, print only):
Epithets aside, the idea that the world is better than it was and can get better still fell out of fashion among the clerisy long ago.
