“How are you so smart?”

It’s a question I’ve been asked all my life, along with its many variations, and having a successful run on Jeopardy! has, unsurprisingly, prompted it to be asked of me more often, by friends, strangers, and Safeway cashiers. And yet, I’ve never found a satisfying answer. I’m tempted to reply, “How does anyone know anything?” but, unless the questioner is really into Kantian epistemology, that response is unlikely to really drive the conversation forward. And given my traditional Catholic upbringing, I obviously can’t just let somebody compliment me without resistance. If I just go around letting people praise me willy-nilly, what’s next? Having self-worth? Pursuing my dreams? Pre-marital sex?!?! In order to avoid such dire outcomes, I generally take one of two approaches.

One is to attribute my intelligence to factors outside of my control. With this approach, I’ll generally observe that I was born with a brain that, for whatever reason, retains knowledge well. I don’t have a “photographic” memory or anything like that; God knows I’ve spent enough time hunting my apartment for my phone to disprove that idea. But while many people, upon learning that, for example, “oviparous” is an adjective meaning “egg-laying,” will quite sensibly forget it almost immediately, I will probably remember it, and without any particular effort. 

Another factor, of course, is my privilege. Unlike most people in history, I wasn’t born into grinding poverty, and my parents believed in the value of knowledge as its own reward. Moreover, I am white, and until well into adulthood, was perceived as male. Had that not been the case, my intelligence would have been seen as surprising at best, and threatening at worst, which undoubtedly would have impacted my intellectual development. But it was the case, and I was never discouraged from acquiring knowledge. (Well, almost never; I was strongly discouraged from acquiring any knowledge whatsoever about human sexuality, with … mixed results.)  

My other general approach is to dispute the premise of the question, that I’m even “so smart” to begin with. After all, being able to do things like name all the monarchs from the House of Stuart is a pretty narrow definition of “smart,” don’t you think? There are many types of intelligence, and the one I have is far from the most useful. God knows, for most of my life I would