"Intellectual" is not synonymous with "Intelligent"
In the '90s, I worked at a graduate school, surrounded by professors with loads of degrees from prestigious institutions of higher education. During one particularly sloppy winter, a student mailed in a take-home exam sealed in a plastic ziplock bag - the sort you use to store leftover food in - to protect it from the elements. The professor who received the exam wandered out of his office with the sealed exam in hand, utterly perplexed and in search of help in removing the exam from the bag. Apparently, he'd never seen a ziplock bag before and couldn't figure out how the closure worked ... nor could he figure out that cutting or tearing the bag would solve the problem just as well.

That was the day I stopped feeling inferior for not having a graduate degree and understood that being smart would get me through life a lot better than being intellectual would.
(bunnybutt, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 18:36, 1 reply)

Onions
My father always referred to these people as "knowing the square root of a pickled onion, if only they could get the jar open".
(Zumbruk, Sun 6 Mar 2011, 12:54, closed)