Let us briefly sketch out the etymology of some of the main English words used to signify the opposite of “intelligent” or “smart”.
Stupid—This is from the Latin adjective stupidus, which derives in turn from the verb stupeo. Both adjective and verb originally convey the state of being benumbed and dazed, so as to be unable to speak or move. English “stupor”, borrowed directly from Latin, retains this sense.
Fool —This comes from the French fou, ordinarily meaning “mad, crazy”. An early form of fou is fol, which is widely thought to derives from the Latin follis, a bellows—the image here is close to the English use of “windbag” for someone who talks a great deal and says very little.
Dumb—This a Germanic word, and its original sense appears to be one that it long retained in English, but which is now nearly restricted to the phrase “deaf and dumb”. To be dumb is to suffer from an affliction that renders one unable to speak.
Idiot—From the Greek adjective idios, meaing “private” or “personal”. From here, via the idea that public life requires a certain nobility, comes the sense of “common” or “ignorant”, and thence the idea of stupidity (relatedly, in English a “clown” is originally a peasant).
The transfer of the above words to meaning “not intelligent” does not happen in English itself: they had all already taken on that sense when they came into our language. But none of them held it originally—instead, besides the windbag, the underlying notions are the inability to speak, low social status, and madness.
So, for this linguistic cluster, if we ask “what is it to be not intelligent?”, we find that the answer is a series of metaphors. It is like being knocked unconscious. It is like losing, or never having had, the power of speech. It is prattling like a madman, or blowing out empty air, like a pair of bellows. It is like being a peasant, fumbling and mumbling among the fine folk from the city.
If we ask “what is it to be not intelligent?”, we find that the answer is a series of metaphors
Anyone who has ever felt stupid—and who, other than the greatest fools, has not?—will recognize all these comparisons. Beyond their vivacity, what is most notable is that they are all comparisons: we do not find a word whose original sense is “stupid” in our current usage. Stupidity, this suggests, is a derived, secondary notion, not part of the earliest sense-making of these languages.
This goes against the belief—so very hard to escape in our desperately ignorant “knowledge” economies—that stupidity and intelligence are primordial and universally perceptible qualities. One would after all expect qualities of that sort to be expressible without metaphors, and indeed to serve as metaphors themselves. Instead we find that they are here metaphor-dependent.
As so often with the history of language, this sequence appears to show a keen intuition. A universal, abstracted essence of “intelligence” or “stupidity” is a concept that will not stand up to examination, however well IQ tests may do at predicting candidates’ success as marketing executives. Any substantial, informing notion of intelligence requires it be situated: the sort of thinking and action that is appropriate for this man or woman, in this situation. I am intelligent in certain places and times, faced with certain problems. Elsewhere I am a pathetic idiot. And the same is true of anyone.
Any substantial, informing notion of intelligence requires it be situated.
The metaphors listed above point towards this, in as much as they frame stupidity as the inability to speak when speech is needed (like the dumbstruck or dumb), or to speak rightly (like the madman or the peasant). The metaphors situate stupidity as a failing relative to a social expectation. They also place heavy emphasis on language and its mastery: that mastery is perhaps the concrete phenomenon that comes closest to our abstraction of “intelligence”. Yet the windbag too has a certain mastery of language.
“Intelligent” and “stupid” are, in the end, themselves metaphors. But they are different from “dumb” or “fool”, in that they compare certain sorts of people and practices not to other, clearly delineated ones (the deaf man, the unconscious man, the madman), but to abstracted ideal types of ability. The current power of these metaphors comes not from their penetration, but from their correspondence to our test-taking, performance-measured, digitalized avatars, who have so largely replaced us in each other’s eyes and in our own. To be stupid was once to be like a man struck dumb. It is now to be like a test with a low score.
