Word: cleverness
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Dates: during 1880-1889
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...beginning to be made against clever people (clever in the English sense, which has come to be American also,) and not altogether without reason. To be clever has been "the thing" in these parts for many years, and every other quality has been sacrificed in order to obtain, if not the reality, at least an appearance of cleverness. What is it to be clever? It is to be something more than bright, but less than intellectual. The clever man is the child of leisure, and, therefore, lazy by birth - an intellectual vagrant...
...however, an amusing, agreeable fellow, and is so much in vogue that he has driven not only dull but profound men into obscure nooks and corners. And yet the fashion of being clever is a comparatively new one, and we are probably safe in saying that up to the time of the civil war a clever man was an object of suspicion. For a considerable part of the cleverness with which Boston is afflicted, Harvard College must be held responsible. During the last ten years she has graduated a number of gilded literary youths with hearts so light and consciences...
...prizes of life, as they are called (whether worth the winning or not) are seldom obtained by the clever. A youth of this stamp takes the chief seat at a club or a dinner party, and sometimes obtains a butterfly reputation in literature, but he does not shine at the bar, he will never sit upon the bench, or arrive at eminence among the faculty, These positions are won by square jawed men, who can neither make nor read vers de societe, but who have the tenacity of a bull-terrier and the ambition of Lucifer. They are certainly offensive...
Though the extract from the Boston Transcript which we print on another page may be somewhat overdrawn, yet it cannot be denied that it contains a pretty accurate portrait of many a character to be met in college society. Whether the "clever" man be a desirable product of college education or not, it must be admitted that he is a constantly increasing quantity in our midst. But, after all, if all possessors of a degree cannot be profound, it is much better that some of them should be only "clever," rather than that the ranks of our alumni should...
...lighter vein Dr. Hart tells in parallel columns the happenings of a year from a freshman's, and from an instructor's point of view. An anonymous writer - can it be an Annex maid? - gives some clever Observations of a Wall-flower...