Talking out your Einstein
HAVE you met a genius lately? You might have driven one, because I’m pretty sure there’s at least one car manufacturer that makes a model called Genius, but I’m talking about human geniuses. I’d be surprised if you hadn’t bumped into at least a dozen since breakfast, because these days everyone’s a genius, even the plumber.
I’m not saying plumbers can’t be clever — some can unblock a toilet with one hand while completing a Rubik’s cube in the other — but does that make them geniuses? This used to be a word reserved for people who did extraordinary things, like inventing the flush toilet or the Rubik’s cube.
Einstein was a genius. Being able to understand his theory of relativity might bring you close to the genius ceiling, but there has to be a line separating the exalted from the merely lofty. Whoever wrote Shakespeare’s words — some say it might have been Will himself — was a genius, but the actress who won an Oscar for reading those words (and then sobbed a lot) is not.
Keeping any word separate from and above the rest is difficult, however, because we live in an age of anarchic exaggeration, where superlatives are kidnapped and set to work in common streets. “Awesome” used to mean something which inspired great awe. Now it’s a synonym for “oh, okay”. Jokes can’t just be funny, they must be hilarious. No longer can you merely admire someone, you have to be a “huge fan”.
Similarly, no one is content with being just clever. Clever is the new stupid. Now you have to be a genius. Where will it end? When parents start describing even other people’s children as geniuses, you know the word is in real trouble.
I am a huge fan of compliments and believe in bolstering everyone’s selfesteem, but I do think we need a clear definition for those rare, supremely talented beings that seem to come from another planet. If it’s too late to reclaim the word genius, we need to commission a person formerly known as a genius to come up with something new.
There’s a word that has suffered even more than genius, and that is “creative”. Once reserved for great art or astonishing minds, it has been torn down and made tawdry. Have any pea-brained idea — put parsley on the soup, paint a flowerpot red or wear odd socks — and you’ll be hailed as “so creative”. It has even, in advertising circles, become a noun: “creatives” are the people who don’t handle the money or the clients.
But back to genius. In ancient times, a genius was a guarding spirit that worked from outside to guide people and make them look clever (although there were also “evil geniuses” that made you slip on banana skins and look silly). As our egos grew, we stole this word from the gods and turned it into a human capacity for greatness.
Genius comes from the same place as the word genie. Genies are wishgranters believed to wear turbans and live in lamps or bottles. If genies are geniuses, why would they choose to live in lamps? There must be far more comfortable places — kettles or toasters or bamboo steamers. Still, I suppose it is quite clever to be able to fit oneself inside a lamp and pop out when rubbed the right way. Even Einstein would be impressed.