This has been driving me nuts for decades: "Smart Quotes" first appeared as the name of a feature of interactive document editing tools, wherein the user would always keyboard the "vertical" single or double quote ASCII character, and the software would look at the context of where that quote character was being inserted, and choose the correct "left-quote" or "right-quote" character to actually insert into the document.
Unfortunately, users (and product managers of competitors) misinterpreted the label in the check-box in the UI that enabled this feature, and thought that "Smart Quotes" meant that the name of the quote characters somehow had the word "smart" in it. But, no, it just meant "turn on the intelligent logic for which quote to insert into the document."
Source: Me, 1988 or so, working on FrameMaker. I don't think there's a reference to the word pair "Smart Quotes" anywhere earlier than the FrameMaker ~2 manual, and certainly not in any book on typography. I'd be happy to learn that I am wrong, if anybody has a pointer.