What is the difference between Smart, Intelligent and Brilliant?

You must know by now how many people use those words interchangeably. How many teachers would commend a student by saying he or she is brilliant or “She’s a smart lady.” In my final years in secondary school, I often asked myself why two or more words were created to express the same thing. And I concluded that it is not possible to create two or more words to convey the same meaning. A synonym will always be a synonym and it will always be another word entirely, even though to the general eye it is seen as having ‘similar’ elements.

The categories of mental skill I will outplay here are not fixed, humans beings cannot easily be categorized because of our versatility and complexity. But it will give you an idea on how to use these words better and the appropriate time to do so.

More importantly I will use these categories to explain how and why people tend to function better in Nigerian secondary schools than others.

SMART

The word smart is a combination of Old English and German words smeortan and schmerzen respectively. The words are related to causing sharp pain as in the normal English word ‘to smart’. Ultimately, from this word arose the ideas of brevity like ‘brisk’ and the fashion of looking ‘sharp’ and more importantly related to being ‘mentally quick’.

So a smart person is ‘mentally quick’. It means the person has the ability to recall faster and more efficiently than the normal person. This smart person can easily trail logic, and solve logical problems like if 5y + 11 = 21 find y. Yes, math problems are logical. Smart people can easily recall formulas that help them solve math problems and they have a good ability to follow rules as this is fundamental to their ‘smartness’. Let’s say computers are really smart, and smart people are similar to computers in the sense that they are very good at following rules. Basically, all I have to do is tell a smart person how to find y and they would be able to solve most problems of that nature that come their way.

Your normal I.Q test is simply a test of how smart you are since this is most likely the only one of these three categories that can be quantified.

INTELLIGENT

As for intelligent, it is stemmed from the combination of two Latin words: inter meaning ‘between’ and legere meaning ‘choose’ intellegere which turned to meaning ‘understand’ as is the ability to ‘choose between’. The word evolved in English so intelligent means ‘understanding’ (this is understandable as it like an adjective of the verb intellegere).

An intelligent person on the other hand doesn’t necessarily have the ability to recall faster than the normal person. Intelligence boasts the ability to understand, find solutions to abstract problems, the ability to see through the obvious and the most neglected; the ability to ask questions that matter. All true geniuses are intelligent. This is because every genius is simply a person that poses an unanswered question to the world and answers it before anyone else.

So you find that an intelligent person can narrate, explain and analyze the entire notable events of the World War I to you after reading numerous books and watching countless movies. And they wouldn’t recall majority of what exactly the books they read said, but they had gotten a good understanding that helped give them the ability to say things from their perspective.

BRILLIANT

Notice that this word, unlike the other two, appeal to the sense of sight and color. Brilliant is fundamentally Latin (from beryllus) and consequentially French and English (combination of brillant and beryl). It means ‘shining’.

A brilliant person is basically one that stands out. To infer more, it can be related to the spontaneous outburst of creativity akin to a particular field of activity. While we may call Leonardo Da Vinci a genius because he created forms that were never before created by answering his own questions he posed to the world, he was also brilliant because he could do things others thought they couldn’t. He was a brilliant artist and an intelligent inventor. Now you see how I used those two words.

I DON’T GET IT, HOW DOES THIS HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH NIGERIAN SECONDARY SCHOOLS?

Schools are small societies with various complexities. Some schools have an economy within their society, holding within them institutions that contain a fair level of influence. However, there is something all schools have and that is a government. Now, the government of a school might be a republican democracy or a socialist communism it depends on the nature of the people involved.

But most Nigerian secondary schools are a dictatorship. And this form of government does not take opposition or questioning of policies, you have to follow rules like mindless sheep. And following rules are very easy for the smart people. Being intelligent in a Nigerian school is a curse, because you question everything. ‘Studying French is compulsory!’ intelligent people will ask ‘Why is studying French compulsory? Why isn’t studying Spanish compulsory?’ smart people will say ‘Yes, studying French is compulsory.’ And you will not know a brilliant person until they write the first French essay.

I will remind you that it is nearly impossible to be completely in either group, we have some of each in certain ratios. I can use myself as an example. I can say in smart-intelligent-brilliant my ratio is 4-7-7. I am slightly below average at math, but it doesn’t mean I can’t solve some logical questions, but since my intelligence ratio is higher I am very bad at following rules but very good at analyzing texts and asking questions. Then my occasional bursts of brilliance can be seen in the particularly creative blog posts or in my paintings and poetry.

I know someone whose ratio is 2-2-9: meaning that this person isn’t very smart or very intelligent but this person is very brilliant. So you find the person standing out in things they have to use their hands or body parts for. However, this kind of person may cope in Nigerian secondary schools because they are not intelligent enough to question the rules they are told, so the person has to put in average effort into being a good student.

A person who has 10-10-10 will be perfect because he or she will be able to moderate each of their qualities and apply the right one at the right time to achieve the best results.

From my theories you can begin to understand how the system works. People with higher smart ratio are made to execute, people with higher intelligence are made to legislate and people with higher brilliance – well, to shine. From here you can begin to understand why some people just found school life much easier than some others. It’s not because they are more intelligent than you, far from it, it is because they have comparatively lower intelligence.

Honestly, writing this post was so hard for me. It has so much logic in it, I kept rereading every line to make sure I applied the right logic.