When I was young the only smart things around were the clothes we went to church in. Then came a decade known as the 80s and with it “smart money” which was always somewhere that I wasn’t.
You couldn’t own smart money, you just heard that it was accumulating around projects that would make other people very rich, very quickly.
We had smart phones that dialled directly, smart cars that knew where they were, and smart missiles that could travel unaided half way round the world to hit a red cross.
In recent years, however, smart has gone up-market. No longer just intelligent, smart is now ultra-specific.Smart sanctions of the kind our Government talks about imposing on Mr Mugabe will hurt him and no one else, I hear, not even the man standing next to him.
And smart revision, according to my daughter, is a new concept in learning which involves targeting what a teacher says so carefully that you can predict which questions are going to be asked in the end-of-term exams.
Of course a lot of people thought the smart money was in Lloyds until all those stupid Names filed for bankruptcy, and we all know that you only have to press one wrong button for a smart phone to put you through to a close relative who simply won’t let you get off and redial.
As for smart bombs and missiles, they’re only as clever as the people who program them (and we all know the American military’s fondness for working from antique maps).
Smart revision is another non-starter, because it assumes that teachers have some idea of what questions they might be setting in three months’ time, let alone three days.
My daughter disagrees - she reckons that tone of voice betrays exactly which subjects need to be revised. I can only reply that there’s one invaluable use of this adjective that has not altered in 30 years. A smart arse is always someone who believes he knows better, when in fact he usually knows worse.
