Another common TV/movie trope is to have someone smart do complex mathematical calculations in their head in seconds. I don’t know anyone in real life who can do this,
Speaking “unaccented”/“broadcaster” English.
A Canadian airline, located in Quebec (and Québécois often value wine knowledge), served me a bottle of white wine with my economy class dinner. A bottle of Eau de Vieux Chien. I was amused. Quebeckers sometimes have a weird sense of humour, though.
I don’t get it.
It was also an indication that Spock was not human. The technique may have been used by robots or computers previously, it became a common Spock trait and spread widely from there. Pretty sure I’ve seen children do that on TV.
You didn’t taste the wine. 
The amusing corollary in that abstract - a positive quadratic relationship between intelligence and measures for financial distress such as bankruptcy, trouble paying bills, maxing out credit cards. Arguably that doesn’t qualify for this thread because the correlation is too strong! It seems contrary to common sense, and I’m suspicious that they may not have controlled correctly for selection bias.
Every one of my friends is a reader. Indeed, reading books is a mark of intelligence.
I was going to add- theatre instead of film.
I used to work with someone who liked to make affectations that he was more well read and well spoken than he really was. He was actually laughed at behind his back by us all the time. His signature shtick was over-the-top wordiness, especially if he was on 2-way radio, usually delivered by punching his words in a dramatic way, like a dog barking, or a weather reporter live from the middle of a hurricane.
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Instead of using the short hand technical acronyms, he’d say the whole term word for word
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He would never use contractions, but rather say the words in a pretentious, kinda’ stilted way. “I do not know why we have not…” instead of “I don’t know why we haven’t…”.
Same here. I can’t really separate the two. I’m sure I’m wrong in some instances, but it does seem to correlate. (Still, I would separate highly intelligent from decent. Some of the most intelligent people I know are utter assholes.)
You are awesome, BrickBat.
And yeah, I’ve met the no contractions folk. Grrrr.
I’m not sure how smart that wino is, the one sitting on the curb drinking from a bottle of Thunderbird in a paper sack.
He’s a poet of the people. Respect!
This is the first thing I thought of. It seems to be a common trope, especially in older pop culture (cartoons, etc.) that the character who wears glasses is the one who’s smart, cerebral, bookish, and physically uncoordinated and unathletic.
Actually, there does seem to be some evidence of a correlation between intelligence and the need for glasses.
Though the trope starts to fall apart with contact lenses and LASIK.
Yeah, I’ve always hate that she would be pretty except for the glasses thing.
Actually doing the calculations in seconds isn’t usually a smart thing. Estimating them, though, sometimes to quite good precision, can be. Feynman (undoubtedly very intelligent) used to brag that any math problem anyone could state in ten seconds or less, he could find the answer to within 10% in 30 seconds or less.
(he was eventually stumped, though, by a guy who asked for “Tangent of ten to the hundredth”)
Seventy-four percent of Canadians require corrective vision. What can I say? We is a smrt peoples.
To go with tropes:
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Few of the absent-minded professors I have personally had were of the highest caliber
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Calculus is treated like arcane knowledge. I’m sure at least half of students take it.
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Immortal characters know everything on TV. We don’t!
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International Genius Symbol: Rubiks Cube.
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Elite school? Elite brain!
I did, but god help me, I didn’t understand a minute of it.
Hey!
Yeah, that’s always bugged me. Say that I went back in time to my high school years, I very much doubt that I’d remember exactly the dates of most future events (9/11 notwithstanding).