In the eighteenth century, the writer P. Bobrykin introduced the word “intellectual” into use. The roots of the word itself come from the Latin “intellect”, which means mind. At that time, the intelligentsia included people who were engaged in mental work: writers, scientists, teachers, engineers and artists. More precisely, these were all those who did not work in the fields, workshops and mines. People engaged in mental work were distinguished by their education and were considered “white bones” among the masses of their kind. Is it appropriate today to confuse the concepts of “education” and “intelligence”? Does it mean that every educated person is necessarily intelligent, and vice versa?
Where did the word intelligentsia come from?
The word appeared in Russian in the first third of the 19th century; it was borrowed from Polish, but with a changed meaning. If in Polish an intelligent person was called a smart person, then in Russia it is “an educated person, as a rule, who has received a higher education.”
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Who is this intellectual?
If you ask people who an intelligent person is, you will not get a clearly defined answer. Some argue that for this person the level of education, knowledge and the presence of a “crust” about the education received are more important, others say that this is good upbringing and manners.
It is curious that both will turn out to be both right and wrong. D. Likhachev in his work “A Man Must Be Intelligent,” according to the majority, gave a reliable description of an intelligent person. He argued that this is a quality given by nature, which education and upbringing only sharpen.
A person born and raised in a family of miners may be more intelligent than one born into a family of professors. Intelligence does not imply the fact of knowledge of sciences and human values, but a person’s desire to know them. Bringing together all the statements of the author of the article, we can conclude that tolerance in relation to the world lies at the basis of intelligence. A fanatic by nature is not an intelligent person. These are radically opposite personalities.
Meaning of the word intelligent
Examples of the use of the word intelligent in literature.
There is another line in the novel - it bears clear traces of autobiography and tells about a family drama, about the history of an extraordinary intelligent family caught in a tragic rift in time, as well as about the unusual circumstances of the birth of the main character, who was born behind barbed wire in one of Stalin’s camps .
General Alekseev had already gained a reputation as a thinking, intelligent officer, and he looked attractive in appearance - a fit, tall man with the broad shoulders of a lumberjack.
She looked brilliant and wild - like in the pre-dawn dream of an intelligent drunkard, according to Kornev's definition: aluminum arcs of electrodes converging into perspective sparkled in the light of the spotlights like cones, glass bowls of high-voltage insulators stretched between them like garlands, ceramic spacer beams lined up in polygonal shapes, gray sides had a matte shine balloon cylinders, the tension of the nylon cables around the cabin fanned out the leveling plates.
But director Roman Balayan interpreted the events in his own way and deeply, turning them into a spiritual drama of an intelligent and charming man, whose role was played by my favorite actor Oleg Yankovsky.
The wide intelligent audience that Chekhov already had at that time was forced by the benefit prices to postpone enjoyment until the next performances.
Because our Berdichev is a link for an intelligent person!
And his small apartment, and his home with Lika - this faithful friend, caring wife and charming woman, whom after seven years he loves even more and is more in love with her than before, and who, it seemed, also feels happiness even more strongly closeness and a faithful and loving friend - the whole situation, all the habits, in a word - everything, everything seemed to him so necessary, dear and close, obtained after the vagabond life of intelligent people not provided with a proper income, that it seemed to Valery Nikolaevich a pointless meanness on his part to deprive his family of comforts .
And Burbulis, posing as an insightful psychologist, an intelligent philosopher, did not even realize that at that moment he had pronounced a final verdict on himself.
All the military men I have encountered - and, as the reader may guess, there are many of them - are highly educated, deeply intelligent people.
Martyn’s relatives turned out to be nice, intelligent people - art critic Armen Gasparyan and his wife Anusha.
Something like a flickering shadow passed over his face, and when he opened his eyes again, the image of Leland Gaunt, who had fooled so many of the people of Castle Rock, returned - the charming, intelligent, civilized Mr. Gaunt.
I even felt ashamed that I had been shaking my tail for so many days, and, to put it intelligently, was cowardly.
Why are two intelligent, respected women - Ksenia Fedorovna worked as a senior bibliographer of one large academic library, and Lena was engaged in translations of English technical texts and, as they said, was an excellent translator, even participated in the compilation of some special textbook on translation - why are two good women who passionately loved Dmitriev, also a good man, and his daughter Natasha, stubbornly cherished the mutual hostility that had hardened over the years?
A beautiful and intelligent woman, she took custody of Żeromski’s works, which were not accepted by the magazine, and introduced Żeromski to Prus, with whom she had long been friends.
These were intelligent people who did not really know how to adapt to the difficult circumstances of that time, and therefore they lived crampedly and insecurely, especially since feeding and even feeding the young red-cheeked scoundrel, who was supposedly prone to tuberculosis and rolled around like cheese in butter, was the main all-round care.
Source: Maxim Moshkov library
What is intelligence?
Intelligence is an acquired personality quality, a character trait. It shows that a person is initially ready to communicate within a decent framework. Such an individual is sufficiently educated and cultured.
You can have several diplomas and remain an unintelligent person. This means that intelligence is not always determined by the level of education. But even without it it is difficult to become intelligent.
As a rule, modern people, especially young people, belittle the importance of intelligence. They consider it unnecessary. Young people are sure that this quality prevents them from making their way in life. But this is a mistaken opinion.
A person works on himself and his shortcomings, eliminates gaps in knowledge, improves his cultural level, and studies the rules of etiquette. Only then can he be considered intelligent.
An intelligent person respects society and each individual. It does not disturb the order and does not attract attention to itself. But it is he who manages to achieve the respect of the majority. He creates a reputation for himself as a tactful, well-mannered and delicate person.
One is not born an intellectual, one becomes one. Therefore, everyone can increase their level of intelligence.
It is also worth noting that intelligence is not an indicator of one’s position in society. A person from lower social circles can be an intellectual, but a person with status does not always show his intelligence.
Etymology of the word
“Intelligence” is a word that comes from Latin. Intelligentsia is a cognitive power, the ability of perception, which, in turn, comes from the Latin intellectus - understanding, thinking. Despite the Latin origin of the word, the concept of “intellectual” is considered originally Russian and in the vast majority of cases is used only in the territory of the former USSR and among Russian-speaking segments of the population.
The father of the term “intelligentsia” is considered to be the Russian liberalist writer Pyotr Bobrykin (1836-1921), who repeatedly used it in his critical articles, essays and novels. Initially, this was the name given to people of mental work: writers, artists and teachers, engineers and doctors. In those days there were very few such professions and people were grouped according to common interests.
How to overcome the dominance of junk words in your speech
Pay more attention to what and how you say. This will be the first and most important step towards enriching your vocabulary. Even though you will never be able to get rid of filler words completely, make it a rule to listen to yourself on tape. Take notes of your conversations throughout the day. With this you can monitor the current state of affairs with the quality of your spoken language. You can use a free audio editing software such as Garageband or Audacity, or leave your own recordings at your workplace or home to memorize speech patterns and how they are pronounced. While you listen, aim to keep track of your own stumbles by writing them down or counting them. If you find the three or four most common parasitic words in yourself, repeat the speech to yourself again until you get rid of them. So, gradually, in small steps - namely, by isolating groups of several unnecessary words, you can “fix” your everyday speech.
In addition, you can also replace these words with more interesting intermediate phrases, such as: “Let's move on to...” or “Another important consideration is...”. If the situation allows, try to speak more ornately. For example, make a list of synonyms and actively use it. Make a promise to yourself in similar situations to use different words each time that are similar in meaning. Fortunately, the lexical composition of the Russian language is one of the richest in the world.
Both methods will, after some time, lead you to achieving more confident and, at the same time, intelligent speech. You will be surprised how these improvements in your conversational style will begin to pleasantly impress the people around you.
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I suddenly understood how to distinguish a real intellectual from a redneck like me. We rednecks can be as well-read and smart as we like, and they, intellectuals, can be as uneducated and stupid as we like - but we cannot be confused, we differ at the very first identification codes. We rednecks may even be oppositionists, and they, intellectuals, may even be loyalists - but we disagree at the very first decimal places.
The whole point is that we, the cattle, and they, the intellectuals, have completely different Russian language structures. We use completely different vocabularies of concepts for the main areas of life.
A real intellectual, when writing about the Motherland, always writes about food and everyday life. Whatever he writes about, he always composes his thoughts from cutlets, pasta, makeup, buttons in the elevator, sweaty armpits, stomach gases, headsets, carpets on the wall, heart-rending neighbors’ dogs, and how he was pushed on the tram. He always remembers when and where they ate, what they wore and what they used to furnish them with. He remembers this even when he writes about art. His texts about some domestic creator are always texts about how he, an intellectual, snuck into the creator’s concert/film/exhibition and tore his tights.
And when he begins to write about something heavenly, not here, then crude materialism leaves the intellectual, and even if he writes about someone’s horrors, stench and armpits, all his grumpiness immediately disappears somewhere. Everything turns into a High Syllable. And he poetically puts forward something like “in Pasolini, the inner world is exteriorized, emanates outward, jerkily revealing the content.”
I accidentally found such an intellectual just now. Here he writes about the heavenly: “The great mythological nothingness of Fassbinder always contains a human nothingness - the simplest animal individual. His heroes, who were born after the end, were born with an inescapable sense of collapse. They are half-bastards, bastards, half-humans. Not knowing either love or understanding, they are unable to live meaningfully and die meaningfully, with feeling. Not only do they have no history, they have no biography. They are phantoms. But participation in another, greater phantom makes them great.”
But after a couple of paragraphs about the Motherland: “But the police state blocks any minorities, this very concept; Instead of half-bastards, bastards and half-humans, there are always nomenclature heroes in the assortment - real men, modest and mournful, and Varvara, a beautiful braid in a darned blouse, with spirituality in her gaze. There was no criminal people who became a phantom people, there were heroes who performed permanent feats. Sometimes there were victims among them, and they grunted and farted until they agreed.”
Feel the difference. How everything immediately materialized. A false braid, a darned blouse, grunting and farting. This is your intellectual, Motherland. This is how he sees you, hears you, smells you.
The same chubzik, by the way, has three further posts about tights and why shoes were not removed in intelligent houses - “Soviet people were deprived of privacy, and intellectuals did not force each other to wear collectivist slippers.”
...And we, rednecks, describe the world as if it were one, common to all people. For us, wallpaper is just wallpaper, and cutlets are just cutlets in Samara and Berlin alike. And director I. Bergman is for us the same living storyteller as S. Bondarchuk - we do not turn the first into an astral entity, we do not mentally dress the second in slippers, special rations and a Volga with curtains. We are outrageously tolerant of food and everyday life; they do not stop us from admiring Vrubel, Gauguin and the sunset. For us, the state of the restrooms in Versailles and Peterhof is one thing, but Poussin and Kuindzhi are another.
Because of this, we always forget where to whine and where to soar. A redneck can write an article about Kozintsev’s “Hamlet” without ever mentioning pearl barley and permanent, but an intellectual cannot. But an intellectual, when he watches some palm-bearing porn like “The Life of Adele,” sees there entirely Violations of Taboos, Passion and Texture, and not like cattle - dyed lesbians constantly eating something and copulating for a long time.
When does the formation of moral qualities occur?
In order to be, or rather, to feel like an intellectual and not be burdened by this burden, it is necessary to absorb the inclinations with mother’s milk, to be brought up in the appropriate environment and environment, then highly moral behavior will be like a part of the being, like a hand or an eye.
It is for this reason that it is important not only to raise a child in the right direction, but also to set a clear example with rational actions, correct actions, and not just words.
Signs of intelligence
As we have already found out, high intelligence and level of education are not integral attributes of intelligence, although they often accompany it. At the same time, an intelligent person must have the following characteristics:
- the ability to appreciate works of art and other cultural assets accumulated by humanity;
- understanding of universal human values;
- a sense of social justice, the desire to protect the rights of an infringed individual or social group;
- honesty, conscientiousness and personal integrity;
- tolerance, tolerance, peacefulness and tact;
- the desire to resolve any conflict with words, the ability to compromise;
- ability to empathize, developed empathy;
- principled adherence to one’s own rules and principles, combined with tolerance for the mistakes of others.
Is intelligence necessary in the modern world?
Let's summarize and establish why modern people need intelligence. First of all, we will be able to avoid conflicts, clashes, envy, and gossip.
We will learn to respect each other, we will be lenient towards the small shortcomings of others, and therefore we will become more tolerant and kinder.
Intelligent communication produces excellent results. It is not necessary to shout and push in line; you should watch your speech, learn to ask and respond to requests.
Many children and teenagers lack intelligence. They don’t consider it necessary to say hello, they are rude to teachers and parents, and they stoop to sorting out relationships with each other using their fists. They are not educated and are unlikely to become intellectuals.
Parents, by their example, need to teach the younger generation to do without rudeness, not to film a person who needs help, but to help him.
Unfortunately, there are very few examples of intelligence. Bloggers filming themselves in front of shrines, making fun of old people, do not serve as role models.
If you consider yourself an unintelligent person, then it’s time to become one. Take control of yourself and change your behavior and attitude towards life.
Modern intellectual
What is intelligence today? Is it even possible to be like this in the arena of total degradation and dullness from the media, social networks and television shows?
All this is true, but universal human values do not change from era to era: at any time, tolerance and respect for others, compassion and the ability to put oneself in the place of another are important. Honor, inner freedom and depth of soul, together with a keen mind and a thirst for beauty, have always been and will be of paramount importance for evolution. And today's intellectuals are not much different from their brothers in the spirit of the century before last, when man - this really sounded proud. They are modest, honest with themselves and others, and are always kind from the heart, and not for the sake of PR. On the contrary, a spiritually developed person will never boast of his actions, achievements and actions, but at the same time he will try to do everything possible to become at least a little better, knowing that by changing himself, he changes the entire world around him for the better.
