Before I read Daniel Karlin's excellent new book Proust's English, I had never given a thought to the word "smart" as part of the French lexicon. Either its vogue in French is long passed, as Karlin suggests, or I do not travel in sufficiently "smart" company when I am in France, but I have never heard the word used in French, where it means roughly "fashionable" or, as we might say in English, "chic." It can have this sense in English too although it is not the most common English meaning. I remember accompanying my mother on shopping expeditions when I was a little boy. She had a favorite saleswoman at a clothing store who would say as she surveyed my mother's appearance in a dress she had just tried on, "Angela, you look so smart in that." This usage endured in English far longer than it seems to have done in French. Jane Austen, in a letter of 1805 (when she was nineteen), says, in speaking of a certain Miss Seymour, "neither her dress nor her air have anything of the Dash or Stilishness which the Browns talked of; quite the contrary indeed, her dress is not even smart . . . " The word must still be used this way although I haven't encountered it in some time. Among younger speakers, it may have been replaced, at least for a while, by "cool."
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