I was reading Dougan’s commentary on Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, which is a perfectly normal thing to do, and at one point (ad 1.49.118) he suggested that the English word clever is derived from deliver.
“Interesting, if true,” I thought, and consulted my go-to authorities, the tyrant OED and the democratical AHD.
It looks like Dougan was wrong about this. The OED calls clever a word “of uncertain origin” and glances uncertainly at a list of possible Germanic cognates, but it doesn’t so much as mention Dougan’s theory. The AHD more confidently derives clever from an o-grade of PIE *gleubh– “to tear apart, cleave”, making it akin to cleave, clove (both the past tense of the verb, and as in the cleavable chunk of garlic), and glyph.
Like you, probably, I instantly thought: The clever cleaver clove the clover in the cleft! In this useful and beautiful sentence, all the different words (except for the articles and the preposition) derive from the same Indo-European root, or so I hoped.
But what about clover? It doesn’t seem impossible that it also derives from *gleubh-, since the plant notoriously divides into multiple leaves—usually three (hence the genus name trefoil or Trifolium), but four if you’re lucky. The dictionaries don’t support this etymology, but dictionaries don’t know everything.
Still, if you wanted to operate under the authority of the dictionary, you could change the sentence to The clever cleaver clove the glyph in the cleft! This is equally useful, if slightly less beautiful.
