Not only that, as father got older his berries got more elder. 
and they smelled
I love the phrase “too smart for their own good”. It is so smug, condescending, arrogant, and self-congratulatory of deep ignorance. It means “I know better than fancy educated people” even though I haven’t a clue why. It has a “get off my lawn” feel to it.
I don’t think of it that way at all. To me, it’s a phrase often used to describe people who have learned just enough to get themselves in trouble. We’ve all heard stories about people who learn just a little about martial arts, the stock market, or criminal activity and then get the crap beaten out of them, lose their money, or wind up in jail.
In this case, I think it’s more that the OP just thinks there’s too much verbal masturbation going on and that if posters here didn’t regard themselves as being so smart there would be less of that going on.
It’s almost certainly an Americanism, and can be found back to the 1870s. It started being used more prominently in the 1890s.
samclem, too smart for his own good. 
During the first Nixon administration, comedian/impressionist David Frye came out with a couple of albums of Nixon satire. In one of the sketches, he’s calling Spiro on the carpet for making (presumably) his “nattering nabobs of negativism” speech. 'Cept Spiro is too, errr “special” to follow along with the chewing out, and Dick has to talk him through it.
At one point, Spiro gets bored, and says “Dick, tell me about the rabbits.”
People on this board are just too smart for their own darn good…
-XT
That’s what I love about the Dope - no matter how obscure the reference, someone gets it.
I think it is possible to be too smart for ones own good - to perhaps be so scrupulously exact and pedantic as to find it difficult to function in the real world. I’m not sure that’s what people generally mean when they use the phrase, however.
OK, but that would mean the Agnew reference is really just the Lenny reference so I don’t get why Voyager asked if it was…
Ohhhhhhhhh!!!
Being raised a country boy we occasionally met folks who was too smart for their own good. People with high IQs and impressive degrees sometimes lacked a certain common sense , or at least, seemed unable to admit their ignorance in areas where us hicks knew more than they did. They were over confident in their smarts and it sometimes got them in trouble.
Me and cousin Zeke sho had a few good laughs about that and we’d say, that there fella is too dam smart for his own good.
LOL (seriously, I did)
The routine won me a few ribbons at Southern California high school speech tournaments.
That’s called obsessive/compulsive disorder and affects not so smart people too. Or so I’ve been told.
I doubt that there is any particular correlation between intelligence and the desire to argue for argument’s sake, or to win a debate no matter what. The intelligence distribution curve for die-hard blow-hards is probably no different than the curve for the general population.
It is a sad fact that most threads that run past five pages have devolved into two Dopers shouting past each other.
True, but intelligence isn’t the same thing as common sense or intellectual integrity. A person with high intelligence but without sound practical judgment or respect for facts, language and logic may well do more harm than good, and he may well mislead and injure himself.
I prefer “too clever by half.” It seems much more precise.
I remember reading a while back in a Cecil column that the only SDMB consensus ever reached was that Bugs Bunny was indeed funnier than Mickey Mouse.
Mickey Mouse is funny?
Hey, that’s half the fun. I think everyone can enjoy a good verbal wank every now and then. And like you and others have said, it’s not that anyone IS too smart for their own good, but that some people’s opinion of their own smarts is too high for their own good.