I'll take street every time.
Quote:
Book smart is simply describing that the person as generally intelligent, well educated and do well academically. However, the underlying idea is that the person deals with situations (especially bad or difficult situations) from an intellectual direction, using or basing decisions on facts, knowledge or insights gained chiefly from books or structured experiences (e.g. studying).
That is in contrast to street smart, which describes the person as having common sense, knowing the ways of the world -- how things are done or doable in real life. The underlying idea is such a person deals with matters at hand from a more practical direction with more pragmatic considerations. In short, intelligence not from books but from real life and personal experience.
Both terms are used to contrast and compare each other -- kind of like two sides of the same coin. As pejoratives, the book smart is one who relies on structured knowledge and suck at real life (naive, easily manipulated, bad judgment) -- and the street smart is 'unintelligent' or 'uneducated' (or incapable of being educated), hardboiled, unsentimental.
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Frowny and DMV be damned. Pretentious bitches.
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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”
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