Playing billiards and having tons and tons of books. I also forgot to add chess in particular.
People can possess enormous collections of books, and do, but I really bet them that they don’t pick up to read a single one. Only to sometimes bring up certain lines to win online and pointless arguments over.
Billiards is usually a bar/pub kind of game, but some others seem to associate it with intelligence. You don’t need to be intelligent to play billiards.
Chess is self-explanatory. Lots of people throw around the line of “people are playing checkers while X plays chess” and other similarities. I think people look way too into chess as being a measurement of intelligence.
Eyeglasses counts?
A preference for classical music.
I never associated billiards with particularly intelligent people tropes. Chess and books, yeah they get the association.
Eyeglasses are an interesting case, because there seems to be a causal relationship between being nearsighted and staying inside a lot as a kid, which used to be mostly people who read books or just spend a lot of time on school work. That’s less relevant now that kids stay inside to watch TV, play videogames or scroll on their phone, though. Also, many people who need glasses either didn’t have the means (e.g. no access to eye doctors, no money for glasses; probably not as important nowadays in most wealthy countries) or choose to not wear them due to vanity, and both of those reasons are kind of orthogonal to adjectives like “intelligent” or “intellectual”.
There’s more to intelligence than acedemics or upper middleclass hobbies. If I had to boil it down it comes to problem solving.
not sure how common a view this is but personally i find being well versed in art/literary/architectural history is a sign of a very well read person. knowledge in these areas usually comes hand in hand with trivia knowledge as well.
How many people actually collect books for show? That seems uncommon and it should usually be fairly easy to tell for people who are somewhat well-read.
The thing with chess is that it’s not fun if you aren’t any good at it, and the difference between people who are somewhat good and those who aren’t is pretty big. You can get there with pure perseverance (same with most other things that gets listed here, probably), but most people tend to pick hobbies that they don’t have a hard time with.
Confident and well pronounced speaking. Combed hair and good hygiene.
This is an observation, not an endorsement. I botch up normal speaking frequently and i find i am way more judged for that than whatever it is i actually say.
Knowing another language
Maybe in some places, but in most of Europe at least, speaking two languages is considered the norm if not the bare minimum.
Being a CEO.
Elon Musk disproves that idea.