Smarty pants addendum

I put up the “smarty pants” blog (May 22, 2013) hurriedly.  Later, after thinking about it, I decided to add some more thoughts.  (By the way, thinking is a highly underrated activity.)

In some circumstances, we may want to call someone a “smart-arse,” but the presence of polite company or young ears may prevent that impulse.  To accomplish the task discreetly, take a lesson from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.  One character, Maria, is disgusted with another pretentious character, Malvolio.  After a contentious exchange, she tells him to “Go shake your ears.”  (Donkeys, sometimes referred to as asses, shake their ears, so in telling someone to go shake his or her ears, you are indirectly calling that person a donkey or an ass.)

A second way to call someone an ass discreetly came to me via the OED word-of-the-day service.  Come to find out, a “neddy” is a donkey.  The word history simply states that “Ned” is a shortened form of the name “Edward,” but it does not elaborate as to which historical “Edward” gave his name to the meaning of “donkey” or “simpleton.”  However, the OED lists usages as far back as 1790.  So if you want discreetly to call someone an ass, refer to that person as “Ned” or “Neddy.”

On the other hand (or in this instance other cheek), sometimes we want to make fun of ourselves.  In a wonderful scene from Much Ado About Nothing, a simple, uneducated constable, Dogberry, unwittingly captures a criminal, Conrad.  The illiterate Dogberry calls in a scribe to write down the Conrad’s confession.  After the scribe has left and Conrad is being led to jail, he calls Dogberry an ass.  Dogberry, in his naive and comic misunderstanding of language, mistakes this name to be a compliment, and laments, “Dost thou not suspect my place? Dost thou not suspect my years? O that he [the scribe] were here to write me down an ass! But, masters, remember that I am an ass. Though it be not written down yet, forget not that I am an ass.”  When I want to be self-effacing, in a tribute to Dogberry, I say, “Forget not that I am an ass.”

When I used to visit Laura at college, she would give me a tour of her current classrooms.  Sometimes I would write, “Read more Shakespeare” near the bottom of the chalkboard.  Occasionally, at the next class meeting, she would find the exhortation still on the board.  Today, I leave my readers with that exhortation, as Shakespeare is partially responsible for some of the fun and subterfuge I offer with language in this blog entry.

Do you have smart pants?

Recently, while bantering in the kitchen with my husband, he took the opportunity to refer to me as a “smarty-pants.”  Admittedly, I deserved the appellation.  However, I had to wonder what quality of “pants” might make them “smart.”  “Smart pants” could mean pants that are fashionable, but I know his intention was not to compliment my attire.  I had to wonder, though, what qualities associate pants with smart-alecks?

I consulted my Chambers Slang Dictionary to find that “smarty-pants,” meaning  a term of light-hearted abuse, has a number of equally informal synonyms:  smarty-boots, smarty-drawers, and smarty-britches.  Chambers also links the nickname to Cyril Connolly, a Brit known mainly for his criticism but also for his essays.  I googled Cyril Connolly to find out what he might have done to have his name linked with this nickname.  He lived from 1903 to 1974.  He was quite the wit, evidently, and rubbed shoulders with the likes of Eric Blair, aka George Orwell.  Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford are specifically noted as having given their friend the nickname “smarty-pants” or “smarty-boots.”

These investigations, however, did not reveal how pants might be smart of how pants came to be associated with smart-alecks.  I can only imagine that “smarty-pants” might have something informally to do with the body part—the bohunkus—which fills the pants.  Think of the term “smart arse,” to use the British version.  After all, smarty-pantses can be quite cheeky!