Words are slippery creatures. They twist and change as they move through time and space, and the meaning that a word has here and now is usually only a part of the story. Take the word smart: in the early 21st century, smart is one of those adjectives that we can safely describe as ubiquitous, which is to say, we find it everywhere, incorporated into universally-used terms, trademarks and expressions - smartphones, Smart cars and "smart objectives" - and the general meaning is widely understood, by native- and non-native-speakers alike, to be "intelligent".
But ask a British person what smart means and they might tell you "well-dressed, or with a clean, neat appearance" - you wear smart clothes to go to a wedding or an interview; you might say that your neighbour's garden looks smart after he's cut the grass, pruned the trees and cleared away the dead leaves. From this adjective we get the equally common adverb "smartly", and the compound adjective "smartly dressed". To become smarter, or make something smarter, is to "smarten", which often turns into the transitive phrasal verb "smarten up" ("You'll have to smarten yourself up before we go to meet the director!"). The opposite of smart is casual, although an intermediate style of dress required in some situations - neat and orderly, but not shirt-and-tie; maybe with clean, new jeans and a designer top - is characterized as smart casual. This, a British person will assure you, is the principal meaning of the word: smart meaning "intelligent" is American English.
But is this strictly true? A clue to the original use of the word lies in another "smart" - the verb, "to smart", meaning to sting, to hurt, to be characterized by a sharp pain. According to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, this relates to the Old English word "smeart", and in Middle English the associated adjective meant "sufficiently hard or severe to cause pain", ("How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience?" - Shakespeare) but soon the use of the word started to stretch out into the figurative or metaphorical "brisk or vigorous, having intensity, force, strength or quickness," and - as a personal quality - "quick, active, prompt." By 1602, we can find a definition that seems to be the ancestor of both the "British" and the "American" meanings: "Alert and brisk - combining briskness with neatness or trimness of appearance".
It seems, however, that the principal meaning of the adjective in the 17th Century, first recorded in 1628, was "Clever, capable, adept: quick at learning, devising, looking after oneself, etc." To be smart was to be witty and sharp - the same meaning that survives into contemporary English in expressions like "smart aleck" (someone who thinks himself / herself to be very clever and witty), or, more vulgarly "smart-arse" (UK) / "smartass" (US). The typically "British" meanings of "fashionable" or "elegant" or "stylish" aren't recorded before 1716.
Clearly then, as often happened, a meaning common in Shakespearean times migrated with the English settlers to the American colonies, to be preserved in American English, while in the British Isles fresh developments of the word's meaning took hold. The American English expression "Smart as a whip" ("That boy's smart as a whip - he got top marks in all his exams!") gives us a link right back to the word's Old English origins.
As has happened equally frequently in recent years, the inescapable influence of North American culture on British life - through film, TV, pop music and commerce - has brought a meaning or usage formerly thought of as typically American back to the motherland of the English language. So it is that the use of smart to describe the particular kind of artificial intelligence integrated into modern consumer products, such as smart cards (pocket-sized plastic cards with embedded integrated circuits) and smart TV (television sets that incorporate computer and internet functions), has quickly become universal.
The word smart has become synonymous with ultra-modern technologically-informed efficiency. In the business world, the concept of smart criteria for setting objectives matches this buzzword to a specially created acronym: objectives should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound. The ultimate in intelligent organization? Not quite: if you then add Evaluation and Reevaluation, your SMART objectives become...SMARTER!
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