Can someone tell writers that 'intelligent' isn't really a character trait?

Cunning, strategic, inventive, astute, knowledgeable, insightful, quick-thinking, etc.
These are traits.

'Intelligent' is such a vague and subjective word, it doesn't actually tell me anything.

If you want to actually communicate something about your character, or to have a clear idea of who they are yourself, you need something more specific than 'intelligent'. That doesn't actually tell me what they're good at, what precise things their mind is capable of.

Oh, and please stop conflating knowledge / wisdom / skill / being top of the class with being intelligent. They're not the same thing. Someone can have had little opportunity to gain any of those, but still be intelligent.

There's generally a whole bunch of ableism that goes along with this culture's concept of intelligence too, but that's a conversation that's already been had so many times.

Oh, and if you're gonna have a character whose only purpose is to be unintelligent (or what you think of as that) and not understand stuff so the audience / other characters can laugh at them?
Don't. Just don't. It's shitty but it's also overdone to hell. No-one needs it.

At the very, very least, if you're gonna go with 'this character is intelligent', make sure you know about the different kinds of intelligence and the different ways they can be experienced and expressed, so you're not just doing the same 'they're smart' character over and over.

And if one of the main ways you represent disabled people (which you should be doing) is to portray all disabled characters as either way above or way below "normal" intelligence levels, your "representation" probably sucks.

Same goes for non-white, especially Indigenous, characters. If they're either 'awed by the knowledge and intelligence of the white people' or 'sooo wise wow teach us your ways', then look behind you, and shove your book up your ass.

Ok, I didn't expect to tell people to shove their books up their asses when I started this thread, but hey, I guess my own character arc took an unexpected turn.

'Intelligent' isn't really a trait, folks (at least not a specific one). And our cultural concept of intelligence tends to be bound up with ableism, racism, sexism, etc (which doesn't mean that applying that same old concept to a disabled Black woman makes you revolutionary).

Anyway, I just woke up and this is what I thought. Gonna head back off Twitter now. Who knows, I might actually get round to doing some writing of my own.

(but I wouldn't bet on it)