Smart Aleck

Filed Under April 2007, columns 

How’s tricks?

Dear Word Detective: I came upon your site when I was looking for the derivation of the term “smart aleck.” You use it in several of your articles, but do not talk about where it comes from. Please comment! — Gail Groves.

Well, there you go. I like to call this process “question-farming.” I rustle up a batch of columns and seed them with a few words or phrases I suspect will tickle readers’ curiosity. Then I just sit back, browse the Adverb Futures Report, and pretty soon my mailbox fills up with a bountiful crop of new questions. Of course, I still have to sift out the annoying chaff asking about “the three words ending in gry” and the desperate pleas for homework help from lazy sixth-graders, but it beats using store-bought questions.

A “smart aleck” (or “alec,” both forms being shortened from “Alexander”) is a know-it-all, a vociferously assertive person (usually a man) who professes to know the answer to any question and forces it upon his listeners with an air of superiority. Smart alecks are, consequently, usually unliked and frequently loathed. The term was first recorded in print (as far as we know) in 1865, and theories abound as to whether there was an original “smart aleck” who inspired the term.

The leading candidate for the original “smart aleck” seems to be a con man named Alex Hoag, who operated in New York City in the mid-19th century. For the details of Hoag’s racket, I am indebted to Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words website at www.worldwidewords.org for his distillation of Professor Gerald Cohen’s research on the subject.

Hoag apparently worked in concert with his wife, a prostitute named Melinda. Their activities ranged from simple pocket-picking to an elaborate ruse wherein Melinda would lure the “mark” into a room with a secret sliding panel. While the mark was otherwise engaged with Melinda, Hoag would enter through the panel and steal the mark’s wallet, watch, etc., from his clothes. Hoag would then exit the room, come around to the door, and pretend to be Melinda’s irate husband returning unexpectedly. The resulting ruckus gave the mark no time, as he fled for his life, to notice that his possessions were missing.

Hoag’s racket was clever, although similar cons had long been practiced. What earned him the label “smart” was his association with two police officers who were in on the con and provided protection for a cut of the loot. Hoag, however, was too smart for his own good and eventually decided to conceal his true earnings from his protectors, a blunder that landed him, predictably, in jail. There he met a newspaper editor (wrongly imprisoned, of course) named George Wilkes, who later immortalized “smart Alec” in print.

 

 

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