Don't Try to Intimidate Me, I'm Not a Sesquipedalophobic

Two weeks without writing is really sucky. But if you're a true fan, read the DOI articles - namely the one about stupid questions (which is fairly similar writing style to what I write here). I've been kind of busy with those three articles, MUNUC, and okay, I'll stop bitching now, and continue.

Well, for the unintellectuals out there, Sesquipedalophobia is the fear of long words.

Have you ever been in a situation where you're listening to a teacher/friend/arch nemesis talking and you're following the train of logic (or lack thereof) and then you just hit a gigantic roadblock in their speech? This roadblock I speak of would consist of anything along the lines of an extremely uncommon, obsolete, or overly intellectual word that you may or may not have heard before.

I have news for you, if the answer is no, then you're one of these people that do this. These people basically read the dictionary, study the SAT word lists (despite them being too young or old to necessitate taking it), and subscribe to about 12 different "Word of the Day" e-mail lists. There's no other way that one would know words such as sevillitude, quintret, cynoside, descraw, and other crap that serves as nothing more than diarrhea of the mouth. These are just not used in vernacular, no matter how hard you try, they just aren't.

When teachers do this, it's really a distraction. Honestly, does this add to the general knowledge of the class? No, of course not. Most times in a regular classes kids will just yell out "Durrr UH, what is such and such a word?!?!" or in honors/AP classes students will turn to the person next to them and mutter something along the lines of "um.. WTH does that word mean?" In either situation, the message is lost due to the extremely ridiculous word choice. It's even worse when you ask "Uh.. What does lugubrious mean?" and the teacher says something to the effect of, "oh, that just means sad." Why didn't you just use the word sad or a more common derivation, jackass?

Honors students do this all the time too, especially when they think they are smarter than someone else or they are trying to be a smartass. It's a train of thought that goes something like this "Heh heh, maybe if I use the word persiflage (basically means meaningless banter) to describe the last 5 minutes of Johnny's presentation he'll feel like an idiot. Heh heh. Because he won't know what it means! Yeah, good idea!" If you haven't taken the hint, this is a common trend among intellectual asshole-types.

Frankly, there is no purpose when people do this other than to flex their weak intellectual muscle on unsuspecting victims. I'd have to say that this technique of bombarding people with archaic and uncommon words is a fairly common method of compensating for not knowing what the hell one is talking about, in which case it functions as a scare tactic or a "make them feel like an idiot so they lose their train of thought"-tactic.

(And by the way, for all of the people who read this who are the archaic-word using type, save yourself 30 seconds and don't look up the words I mentioned so you can use them on your friends, they're all made up.)