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!
A remarkable parallel to the development of the meaning of German dumm (in older forms of German tumb). The meaning “stupid” (instead of “mute”) dates to the 17th century.
“Dumb” in the UK still means “mute” rather than “stupid.” The latter sense strikes me as quintessentially American (which probably means that Shakespeare and Jane Austen used it.)
“Smart” is also not standard UKanian for “clever.” And a smartphone is, of course, virtually always an American gadget nowadays. Unfortunately.
The Welsh for “smartphone” is ffôn clyfar. Cymru am byth!
https://cy.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ff%C3%B4n_clyfar
I bet lots of people think it means “suddenly rendered stupid by surprise”, possibly too stupid to speak. See also: stupefying, stupendous.
“Made in China
Designed by Apple in California”
(China is also where the world’s one and only factory for the tiny screws in iPhones is. The Trumpphone is now officially coming “soon”, and your chocolate ration has been increased from 100 g to 80 g.)
I don’t know why no one has come up with “cleverphone”. It’s cute, in an awkward bad 1930s SF way.
I am (very) obliquely reminded of a now sadly defunct project to replace the operating system of a mobile phone with Inferno
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)
(a kind of reimagining of Plan 9, the One True Operating System.)
The team originally called the result a Hellphone, but subsequently, reasoning that they were based in California, decided on Hellaphone.
@David Eddyshaw: I recall a gag from Ballykissangel, when Assumpta’s ex-boyfriend (and unsuccessful husband) Leo is first introduced. Leo makes a remark about how “smart” Assumpta had been at university, then clarifies that he’s talking about her clothes rather than her intelligence.
replace the operating system of a mobile phone with Inferno
LOL. Use this phone: pass your soul to the Devil.
errm pardon me, but VM dates to mid-late 1970’s: IBM System/38; ICL 2900/ME29 “used microcode to emulate 1900 hardware”; DEC VAX.
Typical dumbass tech bros claim that turns out to re-invent the past.
What claim?
Did you believe there’s a claim that these people invented virtual machines in general in 1995? Dis is a city in hell, not some kind of typo. The implication is that they invented this particular virtual machine.
German purists should insist on using “Schmerzfernsprecher” for “smartphone”.
Phonologically the correspondence between “smart” and “Schmerz” seems straightforward enough, but it did not occur to me that they were cognates until reading this post.
You can still see a meaning close to that of Schmertz/schmerzen in the English verb “to smart,” as in “ouch, that smarts!”
Yes, but that’s rare enough that I first encountered it a few years ago.
If “dumb” for stupid is an Americanism, could it be calqued from German?
I have always wondered if that might be the case. I suppose a lot would turn on how old that sense really is in English.
Dumb in that sense seems to be a normal Belfast usage (but I can’t find any old examples or any in DOST)
“it did not occur to me that [smart/Schmerz] were cognates until reading this post” — same here!
Century Dictionary (1895): “dumb, a. … 5. Dull; stupid; doltish. [Local, U.S. In Pennsylvania this use is partly due to the G. dumm.]”
So the question was being considered even then. Wonder where they meant by “local”.
The OED (2023) says of this sense: “probably influenced or reinforced by German dumm or Dutch dom in similar use.”
A family ancecdote when my juvenile uncle saw bananas in a greengrocer’s window for the first time since wartime rationing had begun:
Uncle: how much for a banana?
Greengrocer: we don’t have any bananas.
Uncle: but there are some in the window.
Greengrocer: those are only dummies.
Uncle: sure all bananas are dummies?!
[Meaning a lack of speech rather than of intelligence]
@mollymooly
I agree; the collocation I have seen for the other sense in Belfast is “dumb mistake”. But again, I don’t know how old or restricted this is.
I can’t help when David M. may have first encountered it but I don’t think of that “ouch” sense of “smarts” as particularly obscure or archaic in English. I don’t know when I learned it, but definitely as a child. If anything, I feel like I must have learned it early enough that the seeming semantic disconnect with the seemingly core meanings (by my own childhood) of adjectival “smart” didn’t faze me or make me want to investigate, so it would have been at an age* when I just took the weirdnesses of my native tongue in stride because I had no default assumption that the world ought to make any sense.
*Certainly before I owned a dictionary which tried to trace everything back to Calvert Watkins’ appendix of PIE roots, which was age 13, but possibly well before that? And certainly before I first learned the cognate German words. (14? maybe older if they weren’t in the vocabulary list for my first year of school German?)
It’s certainly not archaic, but rare on the global scale. In fact I don’t think I’ve seen it printed.
@prase
Dutch smarten, meaning to suffer or feel pain, might make it a bit clearer still. 😉
@J.W. Brewer
I’d swear I already read English books or watched English movies or television saying something like “that smarts” in my early teens as well. For example in a movie like Labyrinth. Emphasis on like, mind, I’m not saying it’s in there.
For some reason I associate “Oo, that smarts!” with the Saturday morning cartoons of my childhood.
I’ve been known to say “that smarts,” but of course I myself am obscure and archaic.
Before there were “smart phones” there were “smart terminals”, which caused the existing terminals to become “dumb terminals”. Some time in the 1980s, I believe.
This might actually be for real. At least one already exists. I can’t read most of the article, though (paywall).
I was going to say “Oh, come on, you know how to use Internet Archive,” but then I tried and discovered you can’t get the full version anywhere. Bah.
In Swedish, the “mute” sense of dum is AFAIK extinct. “Stupid” is the main sense, but “mean, malicious” is common from and to children, and if memory serves the first sense I learnt.
There’s also a sense “annoying, unfortunate”, as in Det är dumt med regn, lit. “it’s dumb with rain”, i.e., “rain is annoying”.
Allegedly it’s just a new “skin” on a phone you can get on Amazon for 110 instead of 499 $; I don’t know anything further.
German has resolved this by applying good old s mobile: “mute” is stumm.
Also found in German, but the more intense blöd seems to be generally preferred for that purpose.
And let us not forget doof.
@ulr
In Tronds example.
Der Regen ist / ich finde den Regen blöd.
*Der Regen ist/ ich finde den Regen doof (would you say this?)
Du. de regen is vervelend/saai (but not, I think dom)
I think maybe better than these in German is active verbal construction
Der Regen nervt mich.
En. “The rain is stupid” seems more like something a child would say.
Stumm is also found in British English and Yiddish-influenced American English, but not standard American.
We discussed the different pragmatics of dumm, doof, and blöd in my first German class. Mr. Chapman had various pictures of people that he would hold up and ask us to use various descriptors. One of the pictures that exemplified blöd (among other terms) was of Leigh Bowery. (One of the other pictures—illustrating different adjectives—was of Tom Cruise, who Mr. Chapman did not particularly care for; however, as he put it, “Meine Frau sagt Tom Cruise ist fesch.”)
It’s more like “in all this stupid rain”.
Yes; except I wouldn’t say it because I’m from much too far south for doof.
Swedish has borrowed this as stum.
(The vowel is short; orthographic final -mm is avoided unless shortening would cause a homograph.)
Doof belongs to the colloquial register; note that in the inflected forms (doofe, doofen) the -f- is pronounced [v].
There are people for whom the earlier meaning “deaf” (Standard German taub) is still alive (I remember someone saying on the radio “Du hast doofe Ohren!”).
@Paddy: Andreas’s example.
However:
@Andreas Johansson: Exactly like Norwegian. Both comments, start to end.
@trond, andreas
Yes, sorry. I attributed the quote to trond. I think “it’s (really) stupid when it’s raining / with this rain” or “Stupid rain!” is slightly more acceptable for me than “the rain is stupid”. But these have a more effete or childish vibe than what I would feel comfortable using.
Interesting; I’m pretty sure my wife and I have said “Stupid rain!” and the like ourselves without feeling a descent into childishness, but these things obviously vary widely.
Me: Both comments, start to end.
Well, actually, there’s a “well, actually”. I can’t think of a single Norwegian word written with word-final double m, not even to avoid a homograph. There are only a couple of surnames, most prominently (Ole) Brumm “(Winnie-the-)Pooh”.
“Stupid rain!” sounds much like something Homer Simpson would say, and whatever you might say about that character’s flaws, “childish” isn’t exactly the best adjective.
Andreas J.: There’s also a sense “annoying, unfortunate”, as in Det är dumt med regn
In Norwegian also about inconvenient or disappointing turns of event. Det var dumt! “That’s disappointing!” Det skjedde noe dumt. “Something inconvenient happened.” Dumt at ingen svarer! “A shame that nobody replies!”
Det var dumt!
My mother used to say that, and now I know what she meant!
Note also the preterite var to conclude about the present.
@Trond Engen: Why would people use different names for Winnie-the-Pooh in different languages (except for the “the” part obviously; Don’t you know what ‘ther’ means?)? Winnie was short for Winnipeg (the name of the bear at the zoo), and Pooh was Christopher Robin’s nonsense word name for a swan when he was a toddler.
@jwb, hat
JWB has it exactly. Not childish, cartoonish.
Brett: Why would people use different names for Winnie-the-Pooh in different languages (except for the “the” part obviously; Don’t you know what ‘ther’ means?)?
For the same reason you translate anything at all – to produce the right response in the readers (here:listeners). Winnie was not a familiar name in Norway when the translation was made, so it was presumably deemed by the translator to not give the right associations. Ole is a common boys’ name. Pooh (or Pu) doesn’t mean anything, except sounding like an interjection of relief. Brumm is what a bear says – with an extra m to make it a surname. That doesn’t mean it’s the best imaginable translation, but it is what was chosen when Thorbjørn Egner translated and adapted the stories for (I think) Norwegian radio.
The German translators did not know what ther meant, so they dropped it. They also didn’t understand -ooh. Result: Winni Puuh.
Like Micky Maus* and Minni Maus, except… dumber.
* Apparently, -ey would have been interpreted as the German diphthong ei in the northern half of Germany back when nobody knew any English.
@ Brett: “Stumm is also found in […] Yiddish-influenced American English, but not in standard American” (May 22, 2026, 8:03 am).
Jonathon Green’s slang dictionary online gives one attestation for the word (as a verb) in the writings of Thomas Pynchon, born in 1937 in Glen Clove, New York, to an American Episcopalian father and an American Roman Catholic mother (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Pynchon) but we can’t be sure he didn’t pick it up in some non-American English source.
Do you find any clear evidence for the word (no matter its spelling, meaning, pronunciation, and word class) in any variety of American English?
born in 1937 in Glen Clove, New York
(from the other thread:)
an infinitive-dimensional metric space
I hereby proclaim today to be known as International Epenthesis Day.
Like Micky Maus* and Minni Maus,
Unlike Italian Topolino and Minni [It.wikipedia “nota inizialmente in Italia come Topolina o Minnie”]
“What is it, Williams?” he asked, his voice sharp with anticipation.
“The nut,” Williams said.
“The what?”
“The person to make a confession, sir.’’ […]
Grant groaned.
“Not a bit the usual kind, sir. Quite interesting. Very smart.”
“Outside or inside?”
“Oh, her clothes, I meant, sir.”
“Her! Is it a woman?”
“Yes. A lady, sir.”
—Josephine Tey, A Shilling for Candies (1936)
*Der Regen ist/ ich finde den Regen doof (would you say this?)
That’s something I would expect from a child or a child-like character. blöd has no such restrictions for me, and dumm can be used even in elevated registers.
dumm can be used as in some of Trond’s Norwegian examples, e.g., – das ist (jetzt aber) dumm “that’s unfortunate”.
@mollymooly: I have read a couple of Tey’s novels, but not A Shilling for Candles. I looked it up online, and apparently it was the basis for Hitchcock’s Young and Innocent.* I think that’s the second best of the films Hitchcock made in Britain, after The 39 Steps (to which it is quite similar). I often think about watching both those films again,** but I never seem to get around to it.
* The female lead in Yoing and Innocent is played by the wonderfully named Nova Pilbeam.
** I got a boxed set of DVDs, with six of Hitchcock’s 1930s British films, for $3 on closeout at my local supermarket.
The 39 Steps
I second your assessment. Tremendous film. (Better than the book, though that is enjoyable enough.)
So should I change my last name to Dumb?
I don’t think that would be smart.
As I’m sure all you Elis are aware, Yale may have narrowly missed being named “Dummer University.” (Jeremiah Dummer was the fundraiser and promoter who convinced Elihu Yale and others to make bequests to the Collegiate School.)
Re : stumm/schtum… This was a word, like ‘nosh,’ that I picked up in England without any awareness of its origin. A few yiddish words — schmatta was another — found their way into British sitcoms of the post-war era, on account of the many Jewish writers and actors. But such people tended not to advertise their Jewishness, and as an innocent gentile I had no idea that the words were anything but slang you might come across in London. I was probably in my late teens before I learned better.
One of my undergraduate classmates had gone to the Massachusetts boarding school then known as Governor Dummer Academy (founded with a bequest from the brother of the fellow Brett mentioned). Unfortunately, there has subsequently been a rebranding. As wiki tells the tale “In December 2005, the board of trustees voted to change the business name of the academy to The Governor’s Academy (its legal name remains Governor Dummer Academy). A marketing company had found that the name ‘Dummer’ was deterring prospective students from applying.”
@jwb
Couldn’t they just lose one of the m’s and say, “it’s pronounced Doomer or Du Mair” (Dahmer might be a less optimal choice.)? How do the descendants of the original family pronounce their name?
Alleged etymology from wikipedia: “The name of the village [in Old Hampshire] is derived from Dun (meaning hill) and Mer (lake or pond).[citation needed] The English surname ‘Dummer’ is thought to originate from here, as the Dummer family were lords of the manor between the 12th and 16th centuries.[citation needed]”
Perhaps a learnedly archaic respelling as Dunmer? FWIW, Dummerston, Vermont was the perhaps-improbable location where Kipling wrote _The Jungle Book_. Does the -ston suffix mitigate the risk of uncomplimentary wordplay?
Mills’s A Dictionary of English Place-Names says Dummer was recorded in the Domesday Book as Dunmere, from dūn + mere ‘pond on a hill’.
They should clearly rebrand as Dunmere, which sounds appropriately Ye Olde England and would doubtless attract upwardly striving donors.
It’s real, it’s available, and… it’s more banal than I managed to imagine: it’s not even a grift. It’s just a gold-painted version of a Chinese smartphone that came out 2 years ago, at the same price even. Only the battery is different: made in the Philippines instead of China, greater capacity, can’t be charged as fast.
Some of the 12 comments are good, too.
“Put those bits of information together and what you have is not an ‘American-Proud Design’, but a phone designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China. I’m failing to find any stirring of American pride within me. I’ve certainly felt it before, so I can confirm that it is absent at this time.”