I would add that my perception of American English has both "crafty" and "cunning" as something that is intentionally deceptive, where "clever" is not.
I think both smart and clever are secondary terms, the base meaning of smart was painful or cutting (Ouch, that smarts!), while cleaver was probably to split up or divide (hence meat cleaver), which constrasts with dull, so both point out the ability to break things down into smaller parts. I imagine in a closed village society, being intelligent could be disfavored a bit, because it would be disruptive.
The distinction between "smart" and "clever" noted by US commentators doesn't, so far as I'm aware, exist in British English.
I think "smart" here refers to intelligence, unless the context makes it obvious that it refers to dress.
GftNC's suggestion that "smart" can mean "posh" is not part of my idiolect. Bryan Ferry, for example, has always seemed to me to be smartly dressed, but never posh.
How fascinating, I have just looked up smart in the OED and the main usage for e.g. clothes seems to be "Attractively neat and stylish, relatively formal". It's true, I can imagine if someone asks what you think of an outfit, and you don't know them all that well and want to reassure them you might say "very smart", but generally speaking most people I know would use it in the way following, which is "Fashionable, elegant, sophisticated; belonging to or associated with fashionable or high society." Like so much else in UK English, it looks like it might be more class-coded than I realised.
And just before those two usages, despite what I have said before, the following: "Clever, intelligent, knowledgeable; capable, adept; quick at learning, responding intelligently to a situation, etc.; astute, shrewd; (of an action) characterized by cleverness or astuteness." In my experience this usage is rare here, although possibly more common as a result of American movies, literature etc.
British usages have long interested me. GftNC's observation that "smart" more or less equals "posh", for instance.
I remember reading somewhere that, at one time at least, a "clever" horse did not mean a witty or intelligent one but rather a well-formed or well-outfitted one. I wonder whether that's still true in the UK.
In the US, would "a clever work-around" and "a smart work-around" mean exactly the same thing? Or is there an articulable distinction there?
--TP
Interestingly, none of you seem to be talking about "intelligent" as opposed to the other two words. It's hard for me to get my head round, because as I say "smart" is not often used that way here - except in the case of something like "street smarts".
I would say that most people in the UK who think about such things would think of "clever" and "intelligent" as almost synonyms, and that both (while frequently connected with education and knowledge) could possibly be present in exceptional people who have had almost no access to either, but who have what I think nous is calling "wits". And then, there are people who are particularly gifted in certain ways, for example with an innate understanding of mechanical (or spatial) processes. At least, that's how I understand the usual usage in the UK, but I may be extrapolating from my own and my (i.e. of age, education, social class) cohort's conception. nous's definitions @05.56 strike me more as something to do with personality, or turn of mind, rather than actual intellectual ability.
So maybe all our understanding of these terms is idiosyncratic....how fascinating this stuff is.
I tend to think of "smart" as being driven by knowledge and "clever" as being driven by wits. It's probably something like the Platonic difference between a philosopher and a sophist (even if the sophists are given a bum rap by Platonism). The clever person is less concerned with being right and more concerned with achieving their ends. Smart prefers appeals to logos and forming an stratigic,objective understanding of the situation. Clever prefers appeals to pathos and takes a more tactical and subjective approach.
I take it from the conversation here that my sense of those terms may be idiosyncratic?
I think that the difference between "smart" and "clever" is mostly a matter of culture (if that's the right term). It's about what you are good at.
Anybody can be clever. But to be "smart" you have to do well at the things that are valued by the formal education system. Not necessarily be highly educated. But able to do those kinds of things.
For example, a great auto mechanic may have struggled to get thru high school. But can be very clever when it comes to figuring out how to fix, or enhance, something mechanical. The formal education system doesn't reward those kinds of abilities, so he very probably doesn't get labeled smart. But nobody would argue against clever.
In contrast, you can be a Nobel Prize winner in physics or chemistry but struggle to do simple cooking or basic home maintenance, let alone auto repair. Which makes you smart, brilliant even, but definitely not clever.
For me, the difference between "smart" and "clever" is mostly about scale. Smart operates on a larger scale than clever. The phrase "too clever for their own good" is illustrative. In computer programming, it usually means things like really obscure code that exploits some odd aspect of the programming language to make this routine run faster today, but that will turn out to be a maintenance nightmare in months/years to come.
They would rather be clever than smart, and they relished the idea of their cleverness winning over their customer's intelligence.
Leaving the gilded age aside, I was interested in this comment of nous's. I recently had to explain that often, when English people said something was brilliant, we mean great, funny or marvellous in some way, as opposed to "brilliantly intelligent". So I'm very interested in "clever" v "smart", and either's relation to intelligence. We don't here use "smart" very much for that sort of meaning, in the UK it tends to mean something like posh (a smart address, a smart outfit etc). But, generally speaking, I don't think we distinguish much if at all between clever and intelligent. Am I right in thinking that nous means here to imply that "clever" is different from "intelligent"? And if so, how? Could it be something like "crafty", or "cunning"?
I've never been to either the Hearst Castle or the Carnegie Mansion in NYC. Are they really as dismally dark as they look in the photographs? Or is that an artifact of no-flash policies and old slow films?
Or alternatively, has four decades of living in Colorado where almost everywhere has huge expanses of glass spoiled me?
sneering at someone's ignorance, particularly in the matter of taste, immediately marks one out as a member of the kind of "elites" that have understandably caused such vitriolic resentment.
I know a fair number of unarguably working class folks whose immediate reaction to Trump's redecorated Oval Office was immediate sneering.
The "Regional Car Dealership" thing is, to my way of thinking, less about class and more about a particular attitude towards salesmanship.
In the decade between my sophomore and junior year of college, I did (among other things) customer service work for a credit card, a homebuilder, and an internet start up, and rubbed shoulders with a lot of people in sales. Most of them were entirely indifferent to the merits of the actual product, and they often didn't understand the actual thing being sold. You know the type. It was all about the hustle, and about status and appearances.
One of the memories that stuck with me from that time was the day that the sales manager at the startup put up a banner in the sales area that read "The world is run by C students" as a way to motivate his salespeople.
There's a lot to unpack in that, between the sort of anti-elitism at the core, and the idea that C-student is a sort of identity to embrace. They would rather be clever than smart, and they relished the idea of their cleverness winning over their customer's intelligence.
This is what I was thinking about when I saw "Regional Car Dealership."
Trump is a vulgar clown, and his residence in Trump Tower reflects that. I don't care. Whatever floats his boat.
But that kind of garish, ostentatious display doesn't belong in one of the the physical seats of our national government.[Not to mention, of course, an historic building.]
God knows, I agree with that, and I have to admit that many of my tastes and attitudes are pretty snobbish. The Jantelagen aspect is also an interesting point. I realise I've never had any problem with mocking or criticising Ubu's taste at e.g. Mar a Lago, possibly because he's rich and fair game. I think it was the "Regional Car Dealership" thing that worried me.
There's a strong strain of punitive Jantelagen on the right these days: You're not to think you are anything special.
You're not to think you are as good as we are.
You're not to think you are smarter than we are.
You're not to imagine yourself better than we are.
You're not to think you know more than we do.
You're not to think you are more important than we are.
You're not to think you are good at anything.
You're not to laugh at us.
You're not to think anyone cares about you.
You're not to think you can teach us anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
They feel small and overlooked and they fear that everyone else thinks that they are simple and stupid. And they have become fear-biters over it.
Ironic that they are so dismissive of the micro-agressions thing, since they have their own version of it going on all the time.
The only alternative, though, is to limit oneself to commonplaces and small talk, and not voice any opinion on any matter of taste.
I've become largely silent where my siblings and their families are concerned. Too many landmines lying about.
I couldn't shake the feeling that sneering at someone's ignorance, particularly in the matter of taste, immediately marks one out as a member of the kind of "elites" that have understandably caused such vitriolic resentment.
I hear you. And, as someone who can be a snob about a number of things, I try not to make fun of or look down on other people's taste. Whatever it is. With, you know, varying degrees of success. But I do try to avoid it, mostly because it's rude, but also because it feeds the dynamic you describe here.
All of that said, we're not talking about somebody's personal taste and how that is expressed in their own home or appearance.
It's the freaking White House, home of one of the three branches of the US government and residence of it's chief executive.
Trump is a vulgar clown, and his residence in Trump Tower reflects that. I don't care. Whatever floats his boat.
But that kind of garish, ostentatious display doesn't belong in one of the the physical seats of our national government.
Cheez Whiz: it wasn't so much the piece I was talking about (as I said I found it interesting and informative), as the reaction it (most particularly the coinage Regional Car Dealership Rococo) provoked in me. While it made me laugh, to me the name RCDR had an unmistakeable whiff of class (de haut en bas) contempt. But then again, maybe that's more just from an English viewpoint.
Well, the tone I got from that McMansion piece was how RCDC was a corruption of the thought-out sources it munges together that simply juxtaposes them without creating or defining any relationship beyond proximitry. Appropriation, if you will. What mockery there is comes from the analysis of the failure of the idea. Is the mockery undeserved? Is criticizing the asthetic taste of the President of These United States punching down?
Looks like a relatively normal room. I'd describe it as grad student / working class (i. e. without a lot of excess cash), but with good taste.
In short, the inverse of excess money and no taste.
Other than a "this looks like pictures I've seen" sort of observation, I really don't have any room to criticize decorating choices. My wife and I always said that our style was "graduate students who occasionally had some found money" crossed with "people actually live in this room".
Earlier this year I got tired of having to climb out of the futon and bought living room furniture that I sat "on" rather than "in". It felt really strange to go shopping for furniture without my wife. Plain because I'm a graduate student at heart. Inexpensive because, well, I might only realistically need to get ten years out of it. Three pieces so that I can separate the granddaughters as needed to avoid "Grandpa, she's poking me!" Everything else in this picture has a back story.
PS Maybe it's because such matters in the UK are so absolutely coded by social class, and awareness of that and its myriad disadvantages is impossible to avoid.
I enjoyed Cheez Whiz's link, which was interesting and informative. I laughed at Regional Car Dealership Rococo (it's perfect!), but it still left me obscurely uncomfortable.
Tempting and enjoyable as it can be to mock Trump, and his absurd and transparent pretensions, I couldn't shake the feeling that sneering at someone's ignorance, particularly in the matter of taste, immediately marks one out as a member of the kind of "elites" that have understandably caused such vitriolic resentment. A sense of superiority, no matter how easily explained, always makes me question how justifiable such feelings are/can be.
I'm not preaching here - I've had to work out why I ended up feeling so uncomfortable after reading it and laughing, and this is just my first stab at trying to account for that feeling.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “A New Gilded Age”
I doubt that "clever" has got anything to do with "cleaver". It might be related to "claw".
"
I would add that my perception of American English has both "crafty" and "cunning" as something that is intentionally deceptive, where "clever" is not.
"
I think both smart and clever are secondary terms, the base meaning of smart was painful or cutting (Ouch, that smarts!), while cleaver was probably to split up or divide (hence meat cleaver), which constrasts with dull, so both point out the ability to break things down into smaller parts. I imagine in a closed village society, being intelligent could be disfavored a bit, because it would be disruptive.
"
The distinction between "smart" and "clever" noted by US commentators doesn't, so far as I'm aware, exist in British English.
I think "smart" here refers to intelligence, unless the context makes it obvious that it refers to dress.
GftNC's suggestion that "smart" can mean "posh" is not part of my idiolect. Bryan Ferry, for example, has always seemed to me to be smartly dressed, but never posh.
"
How fascinating, I have just looked up smart in the OED and the main usage for e.g. clothes seems to be "Attractively neat and stylish, relatively formal". It's true, I can imagine if someone asks what you think of an outfit, and you don't know them all that well and want to reassure them you might say "very smart", but generally speaking most people I know would use it in the way following, which is "Fashionable, elegant, sophisticated; belonging to or associated with fashionable or high society." Like so much else in UK English, it looks like it might be more class-coded than I realised.
And just before those two usages, despite what I have said before, the following: "Clever, intelligent, knowledgeable; capable, adept; quick at learning, responding intelligently to a situation, etc.; astute, shrewd; (of an action) characterized by cleverness or astuteness." In my experience this usage is rare here, although possibly more common as a result of American movies, literature etc.
"
British usages have long interested me. GftNC's observation that "smart" more or less equals "posh", for instance.
I remember reading somewhere that, at one time at least, a "clever" horse did not mean a witty or intelligent one but rather a well-formed or well-outfitted one. I wonder whether that's still true in the UK.
In the US, would "a clever work-around" and "a smart work-around" mean exactly the same thing? Or is there an articulable distinction there?
--TP
"
Interestingly, none of you seem to be talking about "intelligent" as opposed to the other two words. It's hard for me to get my head round, because as I say "smart" is not often used that way here - except in the case of something like "street smarts".
I would say that most people in the UK who think about such things would think of "clever" and "intelligent" as almost synonyms, and that both (while frequently connected with education and knowledge) could possibly be present in exceptional people who have had almost no access to either, but who have what I think nous is calling "wits". And then, there are people who are particularly gifted in certain ways, for example with an innate understanding of mechanical (or spatial) processes. At least, that's how I understand the usual usage in the UK, but I may be extrapolating from my own and my (i.e. of age, education, social class) cohort's conception. nous's definitions @05.56 strike me more as something to do with personality, or turn of mind, rather than actual intellectual ability.
So maybe all our understanding of these terms is idiosyncratic....how fascinating this stuff is.
"
I tend to think of "smart" as being driven by knowledge and "clever" as being driven by wits. It's probably something like the Platonic difference between a philosopher and a sophist (even if the sophists are given a bum rap by Platonism). The clever person is less concerned with being right and more concerned with achieving their ends. Smart prefers appeals to logos and forming an stratigic,objective understanding of the situation. Clever prefers appeals to pathos and takes a more tactical and subjective approach.
I take it from the conversation here that my sense of those terms may be idiosyncratic?
"
wj,
Was Ted Kaczynski not both smart and clever? Just spit balling here.
"
I think that the difference between "smart" and "clever" is mostly a matter of culture (if that's the right term). It's about what you are good at.
Anybody can be clever. But to be "smart" you have to do well at the things that are valued by the formal education system. Not necessarily be highly educated. But able to do those kinds of things.
For example, a great auto mechanic may have struggled to get thru high school. But can be very clever when it comes to figuring out how to fix, or enhance, something mechanical. The formal education system doesn't reward those kinds of abilities, so he very probably doesn't get labeled smart. But nobody would argue against clever.
In contrast, you can be a Nobel Prize winner in physics or chemistry but struggle to do simple cooking or basic home maintenance, let alone auto repair. Which makes you smart, brilliant even, but definitely not clever.
"
For me, the difference between "smart" and "clever" is mostly about scale. Smart operates on a larger scale than clever. The phrase "too clever for their own good" is illustrative. In computer programming, it usually means things like really obscure code that exploits some odd aspect of the programming language to make this routine run faster today, but that will turn out to be a maintenance nightmare in months/years to come.
"
They would rather be clever than smart, and they relished the idea of their cleverness winning over their customer's intelligence.
Leaving the gilded age aside, I was interested in this comment of nous's. I recently had to explain that often, when English people said something was brilliant, we mean great, funny or marvellous in some way, as opposed to "brilliantly intelligent". So I'm very interested in "clever" v "smart", and either's relation to intelligence. We don't here use "smart" very much for that sort of meaning, in the UK it tends to mean something like posh (a smart address, a smart outfit etc). But, generally speaking, I don't think we distinguish much if at all between clever and intelligent. Am I right in thinking that nous means here to imply that "clever" is different from "intelligent"? And if so, how? Could it be something like "crafty", or "cunning"?
"
I've never been to either the Hearst Castle or the Carnegie Mansion in NYC. Are they really as dismally dark as they look in the photographs? Or is that an artifact of no-flash policies and old slow films?
Or alternatively, has four decades of living in Colorado where almost everywhere has huge expanses of glass spoiled me?
"
sneering at someone's ignorance, particularly in the matter of taste, immediately marks one out as a member of the kind of "elites" that have understandably caused such vitriolic resentment.
I know a fair number of unarguably working class folks whose immediate reaction to Trump's redecorated Oval Office was immediate sneering.
"
Interesting to compare Trump's "style" with that at Hearst's Castle.
"
The "Regional Car Dealership" thing is, to my way of thinking, less about class and more about a particular attitude towards salesmanship.
In the decade between my sophomore and junior year of college, I did (among other things) customer service work for a credit card, a homebuilder, and an internet start up, and rubbed shoulders with a lot of people in sales. Most of them were entirely indifferent to the merits of the actual product, and they often didn't understand the actual thing being sold. You know the type. It was all about the hustle, and about status and appearances.
One of the memories that stuck with me from that time was the day that the sales manager at the startup put up a banner in the sales area that read "The world is run by C students" as a way to motivate his salespeople.
There's a lot to unpack in that, between the sort of anti-elitism at the core, and the idea that C-student is a sort of identity to embrace. They would rather be clever than smart, and they relished the idea of their cleverness winning over their customer's intelligence.
This is what I was thinking about when I saw "Regional Car Dealership."
"
Trump is a vulgar clown, and his residence in Trump Tower reflects that. I don't care. Whatever floats his boat.
But that kind of garish, ostentatious display doesn't belong in one of the the physical seats of our national government.[Not to mention, of course, an historic building.]
God knows, I agree with that, and I have to admit that many of my tastes and attitudes are pretty snobbish. The Jantelagen aspect is also an interesting point. I realise I've never had any problem with mocking or criticising Ubu's taste at e.g. Mar a Lago, possibly because he's rich and fair game. I think it was the "Regional Car Dealership" thing that worried me.
"
There's a strong strain of punitive Jantelagen on the right these days:
You're not to think you are anything special.
You're not to think you are as good as we are.
You're not to think you are smarter than we are.
You're not to imagine yourself better than we are.
You're not to think you know more than we do.
You're not to think you are more important than we are.
You're not to think you are good at anything.
You're not to laugh at us.
You're not to think anyone cares about you.
You're not to think you can teach us anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
They feel small and overlooked and they fear that everyone else thinks that they are simple and stupid. And they have become fear-biters over it.
Ironic that they are so dismissive of the micro-agressions thing, since they have their own version of it going on all the time.
The only alternative, though, is to limit oneself to commonplaces and small talk, and not voice any opinion on any matter of taste.
I've become largely silent where my siblings and their families are concerned. Too many landmines lying about.
"
I couldn't shake the feeling that sneering at someone's ignorance, particularly in the matter of taste, immediately marks one out as a member of the kind of "elites" that have understandably caused such vitriolic resentment.
I hear you. And, as someone who can be a snob about a number of things, I try not to make fun of or look down on other people's taste. Whatever it is. With, you know, varying degrees of success. But I do try to avoid it, mostly because it's rude, but also because it feeds the dynamic you describe here.
All of that said, we're not talking about somebody's personal taste and how that is expressed in their own home or appearance.
It's the freaking White House, home of one of the three branches of the US government and residence of it's chief executive.
Trump is a vulgar clown, and his residence in Trump Tower reflects that. I don't care. Whatever floats his boat.
But that kind of garish, ostentatious display doesn't belong in one of the the physical seats of our national government.
"
Cheez Whiz: it wasn't so much the piece I was talking about (as I said I found it interesting and informative), as the reaction it (most particularly the coinage Regional Car Dealership Rococo) provoked in me. While it made me laugh, to me the name RCDR had an unmistakeable whiff of class (de haut en bas) contempt. But then again, maybe that's more just from an English viewpoint.
"
Well, the tone I got from that McMansion piece was how RCDC was a corruption of the thought-out sources it munges together that simply juxtaposes them without creating or defining any relationship beyond proximitry. Appropriation, if you will. What mockery there is comes from the analysis of the failure of the idea. Is the mockery undeserved? Is criticizing the asthetic taste of the President of These United States punching down?
"
Looks like a relatively normal room. I'd describe it as grad student / working class (i. e. without a lot of excess cash), but with good taste.
In short, the inverse of excess money and no taste.
"
Other than a "this looks like pictures I've seen" sort of observation, I really don't have any room to criticize decorating choices. My wife and I always said that our style was "graduate students who occasionally had some found money" crossed with "people actually live in this room".
Earlier this year I got tired of having to climb out of the futon and bought living room furniture that I sat "on" rather than "in". It felt really strange to go shopping for furniture without my wife. Plain because I'm a graduate student at heart. Inexpensive because, well, I might only realistically need to get ten years out of it. Three pieces so that I can separate the granddaughters as needed to avoid "Grandpa, she's poking me!" Everything else in this picture has a back story.
"
PS Maybe it's because such matters in the UK are so absolutely coded by social class, and awareness of that and its myriad disadvantages is impossible to avoid.
"
I enjoyed Cheez Whiz's link, which was interesting and informative. I laughed at Regional Car Dealership Rococo (it's perfect!), but it still left me obscurely uncomfortable.
Tempting and enjoyable as it can be to mock Trump, and his absurd and transparent pretensions, I couldn't shake the feeling that sneering at someone's ignorance, particularly in the matter of taste, immediately marks one out as a member of the kind of "elites" that have understandably caused such vitriolic resentment. A sense of superiority, no matter how easily explained, always makes me question how justifiable such feelings are/can be.
I'm not preaching here - I've had to work out why I ended up feeling so uncomfortable after reading it and laughing, and this is just my first stab at trying to account for that feeling.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.