Bad Punchline: Scary Smart

One of my coworkers and I were talking about our 'formative years' last night and I was reminded of two things my father says about me when I was a little kid. One is that I was an "awfully cunnin little kid" and whatever happened to that? (If you're wondering 'cunnin' is a colloquialism applied typically to small children and it means 'cute'.) I am apparently no longer cute but I'm also no longer a small child so I think that one is easily explained. The other thing is that I used to be 'scary smart' and this coming from a man with a tested IQ of 156 (and who would probably score higher if there was no reading involved as reading is not the strong suit of a dyslexic) is an intriguing compliment but (again) he wondered what happened to that. I explained the latter in much less detail and then said something like this: "The thing that he's never correlated is that it's not that something happened to my intelligence but rather that I learned something else. Among my artillery of 'social skills' I learned how to seem less intelligent to other people so I could fit in better and even then I still come off as an arrogant jerk. If I acted as intelligent as my father felt I was back then I'd be insufferable."