clever

Comparison goes either way: cleverer and cleverest stand beside more clever and most clever, and both are standard. The Economist's phrase "the cleverest and most prolific inventors" shows the two habits side by side, with -est on the short word and most on the long one.

A word that has often been set below greater praise. Charles Kingsley's line "Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever" ranks it beneath goodness. Macaulay, quoted in 1860, allowed England "many clever men" but only two great creative minds. Calling someone clever is warm praise, but placed beside a bigger word it can mark quickness rather than depth.

Resourcefulness aimed at a goal, and the fox is its emblem: clever like a fox. Here the cleverness is practical and judged by what it gets done. It describes the lawyer who wins an acquittal, or Molly Whuppie in Joseph Jacobs's English Fairy Tales (1890), who notices exactly what the giant does before bed. Unlike the "quick to learn" meaning, it measures results rather than understanding.

Here the quality passes from the person to what the person devises: a clever trick, a clever route, clever financial ploys. Such phrases praise the thinking behind the thing rather than the thinker. Where the "witty, original" meaning admires novelty and flair, this sense admires a problem neatly solved, even when the solution is simple.

Wit and invention in things said and made. Jane Austen writes of "clever riddles" in Emma (1816), and the speaker in Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence (1919) can think of "clever things" only after the party. A footballer's pass can be clever too. The word pairs easily with little, as in a clever little device, where little conveys fondness for ingenuity on a small scale.

The bodily sense, closest to where the word began. It came through East Anglian dialect cliver, "expert at seizing," from Middle English cliver, "tenacious," perhaps from an Old English word for "clinging." Cleverness began in the grip. It still pairs naturally with with, as in clever with his hands. Child's Ballads praises Highland men as clever "at handling sword and shield."

A British colloquial use that lives almost entirely in the negative. Not feeling too clever means feeling unwell, and legs that don't look too clever are in poor shape. The usual frame is not too clever, an understatement. Without the negative, feeling clever is rare in this sense and would be heard as a remark about intelligence.

An anthropologist's term, used of Aboriginal Australians, for the person a community turns to for magic. It usually travels with a noun: clever man, clever women, clever fellow. In John & Sue Erbacher's Aborigines of the Rainforest (1991) the clever fellow is the tribal doctor, who cures sickness, finds the causes of death, predicts the future, and makes and stops rain. Keep the noun close, or readers will hear the everyday 'intelligent' meaning.