Smart vs. Dumb.

Nitsuh Abebe’s latest “On Language” column (archived; see this LH post) features the 21st-century sense of “smart”:

The 21st-century tech industry has accomplished a lot of cool things, but among the most remarkable may be a trick of language: It managed to make the word “smart” feel repulsive and the word “dumb” sound appealing.

How else to explain the news that more than a quarter of younger Americans are curious about switching to a “dumbphone?” (That’s a cellular handset with only basic features — perhaps an old-school flip phone with push-button T9 texting, or perhaps a purpose-built minimalist device like the Light Phone.) […]

The “dumb” attached to these products is creating retronyms — those labels, like “landline” or “snail mail” or “silent film,” that are only necessary in hindsight, after we’ve invented phones that roam and movies that talk. It wasn’t until a million gadgets started billing themselves as “smart” that we had any reason to distinguish their predecessors as less so. “Smart” arrived earlier than you might think: Ericsson called its GS88 a “smart-phone” in 1997, a decade before Apple entered the market. It was after internet-connected touchscreens were in everybody’s pockets, though, that we experienced the great push to make everything smart. […]

Here, too, there is a funny trick of language. Both “smart” and “dumb” seem to have arrived at their usual meanings via metaphor. “Dumb,” for most of its life in English, meant mute, unresponsive — stupefied, potentially, but mostly just silent. This is why a previous tech innovation was called the “dumb waiter”: It would pulley something upstairs without a word. The change to indicating stupidity is only a few hundred years old — recent enough that most of us have no trouble understanding a word like “dumbstruck.” As for “smart,” the original meaning is the one involving a sharp pain. But we use a lot of bladelike metaphors to describe intelligence — sharp, keen, cutting, incisive, piercing, penetrating — and sometime around the 16th century, “smart” attached itself to a sharp mind.

Which means that, on some strange level, we may have circled around to the origins of these words. The smart things are paining us. The dumb ones are blessedly quiet — which, at this point, can feel like the more intelligent option.

I like the etymological bit at the end, of course, but I highly approve of any and all bashing of the excessively connected life; click through for horrific examples like Smalt (a smart saltshaker that could interface with Amazon devices and dispense salt in an “interactive way”). Thanks, cuchuflete!