Being incomprehensible does not equate to being intelligent. In fact, bringing up examples of such behaviour undermines your own assertions of the alleged intelligence that you possess.

Alright. This Tropette knows a few words more than her peers (do keep in mind, she's 13), but ''seriously,'' people? She was asked about a year ago, by her sister (two years ''older'' than TT), what the word ''exasperated'' meant, and the fact that when she peppers complex, polysyllabic words into her informal, day-to-day speech, her friends give her odd looks and tell her, "In English, please!" just, well, exasperates her! Is it really that odd to use ''sordid, impeccable, synonymous, homogeneous'' and ''adamant'' in everyday speech? ;_; Or does TT just hang around with blithering idiots?

And, as an afterthought, the OP's speaking habits were transferred to her classmates. Invoking a word she uses regularly, such as ''essentially,'' has gained the power to instantly win a debate or otherwise gain the upper hand of an intelligent or intellectual conversation.

I do this a lot, I just can't help it. So does my brother, throwing in big words even if he doesn't know what they really mean most of the time. FollowTheLeader , you know. One incident gets a special mention though, during an Internet Arguement (TM), I gave another user a page long explanation telling him why he was wrong. He was pissed, and gave an angry reply, telling me that I wasn't worth arguing with because I had "just randomly mashed the keyboard".

This Troper doesn't often get into the habit of constructing entire sentences with thick meaty words unless it's funny in that circumstance, but does like to just throw in a highly advanced word once in a while that even an [i]English[/i] teacher may not know and has to look up or ask me about, and it makes me beastly in Scrabble(provided I have the correct letters, of course). Fuck yeah, words rule.

This Troper actually went so far as to use the phrase "sesquipedalian loquaciousness" in a recent English paper, as well as several examples.

This Troper definitely. Usually only after someone gets him riled up. As he says, "Sometimes I like to use my vocabulary as a cudgel."

ThisTroper is a walking, talking, confusing example of this trope. He has driven a certain group of sleep-deprived adolescents (here I go again.) to employ writing utensils as projectiles (Why doesn't anyone stop me?) after describing a graphic novel to a friend. Apparently, nihilism is beyond the vocabulary of most high-school juniors.

This tropette is a subversion, often using such phrases in her papers, but in real life talks like a valley girl in the suburbs of Chicago

This troper often has this manner as well, but with a twist. There are several members of his family that don't speak English at all! Since I don't speak Spanish, someone has to translate for me. The standard family translators would like me to stop, but I don't do it consciously.

ThisTroper remembers a line he wrote in a script recently, and the subsequent conversation with his actress. #QUOTE# "What's a termagant?"\\ "Oh. Basically, a harpy."\\ (Blank stare.)\\ "Uh, a witch."

Plus, it's a Tyranid breed. Now You Know.

This teenage girl troper once gave her mother and her doctor quite a laugh when the doctor was trying to explain in simple terms what was wrong with the coloration on this troper's foot. #QUOTE# Doctor: It's perfectly safe, it's just that you're producing too much color there, it's nothing dangerous- #QUOTE# Me: Oh. So you mean it's a benevolent hyperpigmentation. #QUOTE# Doctor: ... Yes. That's exactly what I mean. (laughter) #QUOTE# Mother: ... Only my daughter would use the word "hyperpigmentation" in daily language in her mid teens. (laughter)

Shouldn't it be "benign"? As this troper understands, "benevolent" would denote that something is actively helpful or good.

Perhaps the aforementioned troper likes the way things are turning out. Words are so subjective some times.

This Troper has been known to lapse into the realm of {{Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness}} every now and then, usually attempting to explain the context of his object of contemplation in such a way that it leaves little or no room for misconception by the possibly less knowledgeable audience and often resulting in sentences of such exasperating length and riddled with such florid figure of speech which is in worst case augmented by a multitude of esoteric expressions that the poor listener (and all too often, this troper himself) has long forgotten what the original subject was by the time this troper has finished his extensive soliloquy.

I submit to you, sir, that we were placed in discrete points of custody immediately upon our entering this universe.

This troper's English teacher hates it when students chew gum in his classroom. Apparently several years ago, one boy in particular was chewing so loudly that the teacher finally snapped and yelled "WILL YOU STOP MASTICATING IN MY CLASSROOM?!" Needless to say, among a bunch of high schoolers this got mistaken for something else...

Saying "masticate" is really fun for this troper and his friends. "Hey, you wanna go masticate with each other later?" "Sure, but I already masticated today" "I was masticating and all this white stuff came out!" And yes, I'm in high school.

''White stuff?'' Your eating habits disturb me.

What's disturbing about marshmallows?

Or Snoballs, for that matter?

Something similar happened to this troper while she wrote and edited for her school's newspaper. She delivered a completed article to another editor to be checked before submission; it was returned to her with the word ''exacerbated'' circled and marked "?". Rather than replacing it with "made it worse," she left it in.

This troper commends you.

This troper is friends with a lot of people interested in different things and constantly gets accused of using big words for no reason. But actually if you're one of the friends who knows a lot about the subject I'm talking about, I tend to sound like an person with lesser knowledge and sound like an idiot.

This not unknown for this Troper, he often combines it with DeadpanSnarker for humor.

This troper's ex-boyfriend. Sure we kicked ass in team scrabble, but there's no reason to use "bildungsroman" (coming-of-age story), "pedagogy" (teaching as an art), or "defenestrate" (to throw out a window) in a sentence. Ever. And yes, he's an English professor.

Hey, defenestrate is an ''awesome'' and underutilized word.

Seconded, and this Tropette would even go so far as to call it a CrowningMomentOfAwesome for the ''entire English Language''.

How about "Cease and desist this moment or I will ''defenestrate'' you!"

Mirtai, that's a terrible thing to do to a man!

Pedagogy is a perfectly valid word. And it's going to be difficult to educate teachers if you don't use that word -- it (also, more commonly) means "the ''science'' of teaching", or just, well, teaching.

Both pedagogy and defenestration are extremely valid. For one thing, there's the First and Second Defenestrations of Prague. (Yes, there are two different historical events involving people being thrown out of windows in Prague) How else would one discuss them? The Second one started the 30 Years War, it was hardly a minor event.

The film of TheManWhoFellToEarth has a memorable defenestration scene. Somewhat related: the climax of the--very cool--short film ''We Have Decided Not to Die'', in which someone jumps out of a window (in extreme but vivid slow-motion, achieved with speeds upwards of 500 frames-per-second). Is there a word for jumping?

Autodefenestration?

This troper had his innocence fried after finishing a 100-page M.Sc. thesis. His professor sent it back full of red ink. Apparently the point of language is not to give over information; it's to sound pompous and important, and so all the nice short words in the thesis had to be replaced with bigger, more confusing ones.

Your professor is an idiot. This troper was taught that words shouldn't be distracting but should sound intelligent enough for the person writing a paper to sound like they know what they're talking about. This requires a bit of guessing for some people, but a bit of it common sense. Generally using words nobody ever uses in writing is not a good idea and really DOES make you sound pompous.

This troper was taught that too...until he started doing Anatomy classes at uni. See below for more information.

This Troper apparently was like this from an extremely young age, using words like "dignity" and "unfortunate" in regular conversation... at age ''3'' . It only got worse from there, particularly now that said troper is an English major...

Hey, me too! I don't remember it, but my mother says I used the word "concentrate" in perfect context when I was 3.

I wasn't aware this was unusual.

Nor I

This troper has started to fall into this after his main group of friends suddenly became the top Model [=UN=] delegates.

This troper tends toward this all the time, because she likes to be as precise as possible and will assimilate any unfamiliar word she comes across into her vocabulary. (Technically, that's only two of the factors involved, but I'm simplifying to avoid WallsOfText that aren't particularly relevant. See, there it is in action.) However, it ramps up considerably when she's angry, occasionally overlapping with ClusterFBomb (via SophisticatedAsHell, by nature) if it's the right flavor of anger. She has dubbed the worst flare-ups of her sesquipedalian tendencies "word vomit".

This troper humbly submits that you rename these flare-ups "logological emesis", for added HypocriticalHumour.

This troper does this ''all the time'' with his friends, however, they can respond in kind, so he doesn't feel bad. He also once got into a Sesquipedalian Duel with a guy in his English class. It went on for over half the period, and only ended when the teacher pulled out a word that stumped both of us.

This FAQ. Also notice how all the lines end evenly - the author went out of his way to do that by playing around with word length.

This troper did it more and more in his English class this year, until he found this page, and wrote in a personal school assessment that he was 'loquacious to the point of becoming sesquipidelian'. I've now become an in joke in the English department, apparently.

Perhaps because you didn't use either word correctly?

This troper has been accused of this by people who do not know her well, though her close friends who all have the same basic vocabulary are able to understand her easily. Apparently words like 'incandescent' and 'congregation' are too large for sophomores to understand.

This troper feels your pain. At the age of five, I once toddled up to my mother and asked what "torque" meant. Since then, or possibly before, I have adored the plethoric sesquipedalia of the English language, and I confess I suffer from a sadistic urge to use "big words" for the sheer sake of confusing people. The earliest example I can remember was leaving my fellow first-graders bewildered by calling something "irrelevant" to the topic. I always hoped that my situation would improve, but it would appear that "supernatural" is beyond eighth grade comprehension and "languid" is beyond even juniors.

At this troper's high school graduation the first of two (female) student speakers spoke like this. Her utilization of the language in such context perplexed and exasperated a significant percentage of the population present in the gymnasium, as they could not readily comprehend such complex verbosity.

This troper is this trope embodied. Because of her highly advanced vocabulary much of her school years were spent in frustration--especially since students in fourth grade were still restricted to one-syllable spelling words. This troper also lived next to a family of neighbors for whom words longer than three syllables were another language entirely. Much frustration ensued.

It annoys the heck out of this troper that popular people do not understand the theory of Latin Roots. Three syllable words are incomprehensible (a word they don't understand) to them. I use this to my advantage by calling them rather easily decodeable insults, like them being katagelophobic hygienophiles. (double points to anybody who knows what it means.)

Cleanliness lovers who fear ridicule.

That has to be one of the worst insults I have ever heard.

Then let's try it again then, approval obsessed neat freaks.

This annoys me as well. It's even worse when ''teachers'' don't get them. I had to take an etymology course in high school, so I know a few more Latin (and Greek) roots, than usual, but the number of people who should have picked up ''some'' and haven't is astonishing. I took a medical terminology course and the number of students who hadn't previously realized that words could be broken up like that was quite sad.

This troper spends a great deal of time on a debate forum where swearing and vulgar language are against the rules, thus many people have come up with clever ways of bypassing the censor in order to express the same meanings. Some examples of common swear / dirty words include ''posterior anatomical orifice, solid digestive excretion, lower anatomical extremities,'' and ''incestuous maternal copulator''. Variations do exist, of course.

Wouldn't that third one mean "feet"?

feet.

My vocabulary is extensive enough to be able to finish a ''Teacher's'' sentence with fancy words and stuff... when I'm not helping others find words.

This troper often falls into this, but especially when drunk. Of course, considering the effects it has on normal people, I often have to struggle to find synonyms for "ameliorate" or "desultory".

ThisTroper is an example of the Asperger's Disorder variation. Precision and accuracy seem to inevitably come at the expense of ease of communication. And, of course, it's very difficult to convey ''nuance'' in two sentences or less, and the average listener seems to simplify the speaker's position to the first two sentences of their statement. The English language isn't designed for precision, either.

This troper is constantly reminded of his tendency to indulge in this trope, usually by his sisters (who do not read nearly as much as he does) asking him what some word he just used means. Oddly, the word he most often gets called out on is "ascertain" (which he considers to be a very simple, easily-utilized word, and thus uses it somewhat often). It's much more prevalent in his writing, and he'll sometimes invoke the trope for his own amusement. In fact, according to his senior class, he was "most often seen spouting TechnoBabble."

Many people who become lawyers have fairly large vocabularies and a penchant for florid speaking and writing, which is why in Law School the instructors try to get you out of that habit, since the benefits of simplicity and clarity trumps linguistic elegance when you're trying to persuade. For an example of how this has affected American jurisprudence, compare the written opinions of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Antonin Scalia, both considered great legal writers.

Certified by Da_Nuke, who often sees law students using words like "copulate" instead of "fuck", and "opulent" instead of "rich". (As for himself, he is a telecommunications engineering student who has negligent difficulties with scientific language, and who is sometimes joyful of ocassionally using convoluted expressions whenever he has a desire for sounding educated).

This troper reads such books as "The Grand Panjandrum" and "The Insomniac's Dictionary", and ''loves'' the weird and oftentimes oververbose words within, including phallophobia, morosoph, and klikkaklakkaklaskaklopatzklatschabattacreppycrottygraddaghsemmihsammihnouithappluddyappladdypkonpkot. last one was from ''FinnegansWake'', it stands for the sound of crashing glass.

In response to my oververbose tendencies, a male peer remarked something along the lines of: #QUOTE#"I am a ''man''; I can only handle small words at a time!"

This troper has a tendency to use words like "elucidate" instead of "explain," "abhor" instead of "hate," and "horrid" instead of "bad" in everyday conversation. Because of this, she has acquired a reputation among family, friends, and classmates as a sort of walking human dictionary, who will confuse you terribly but define the word that confuses you as well (when she's feeling nice about it).

This troper would use "horrid" but not "abhor" or "elucidate." The latter two seem too archaic. Oh crap, it just happened again!

This troper uses all of those, but would like to point out that the contextualized meaning of abhor, horrid, and elucidation have shifted such that they are not truly synonymous with the words you are replacing in many/most cases.

Elucidate means to make clear, which isn't quite explain, and abhor is closer to despise than hate, which are two different things.

This troper has this in spades. Of course, combined with a New England accent so thick you could cut it up and sell it as pillows and a slight head cold, he tends to sound like some kind of deviant freak to anyone not born and raised on the Cape. And even then, he has to explain what he's trying to say, which leads to many sure lets go with that moments.

This troper is often asked by her classmates to "stop using big words". Needless to say, it's impossible to stop.

Subversion, ever get patronized for using a word the person patronizing you thinks is a complex word, but really isn't all that complex? How is knowledge of the word antagonist that amazing?

This troper has ''hereditary'' SesquipedalianLoquaciousness... my paternal grandmother and my father both had it before me, and some of the "big words" I use were taught to me by them.

This troper loves big words and the effect they can sometimes have. She was recently privy to a conversation in which someone observed another person's new wristwatch and asked, in perfect seriousness, "What does it do?" Troper's response was to say that it was "an apparel-based temporal prognosticator."

''That'' is brilliant.

While certainly sesquipedalian, the above is not entirely ''accurate''. 'Prognostication' is the act of '''''fore'''''''sight'', as evidenced by its use of 'pro-' (which is synonymous with 'before' when used in discussion of time, hence words such as 'prologue') and 'gnosis', or knowledge. A similarly eloquent, yet more precisely accurate description would be "Apparel-based temporal ''locator''."

Of course being generally asked by teachers to finish their sentences qualifies one for this trope, but when your friends have called you a walking encyclopedic dictionary since you were thirteen, including new friends who have only known you for a week, you're in trouble. When your Creative Writing Seminar tutor uses you as an example of a Latinate word user, you're doomed. Not one of my friends has ever called me an encyclopedic dictionary, they usually say 'knows a lot of words and stuff.'

This troper doesn't do it on purpose, I just have a tendency to want to use the ''correct'' word for the situation, combined with a large vocabulary (acquired by reading just about everything I could get my hands on when I was a kid). Which has led to people thinking I was showing off, e.g., when I mentioned the "ubiquitous" discarded plastic bags in the poorer neighborhoods of a certain city. Someone commented, "Only (name) would use that word in a sentence without even thinking about it." In fact, I can still remember the time six months ago when a conference speaker used a word I'd never heard of before; it was a memorable event because it happens so rarely. (The word was "hendiadys", by the way).

This troper wonders if you're him. I have the same exact explanation - I prefer to use the most succinct and apt words in a given context - but am constantly being accused of trying to sound "smart" by doing so. I also received quite a shock when you referenced "ubiquitous" specifically, which is one of my most oft-used words. It's really... ubiquitous.

This troper is with the both of you. Once I've found the word with the correct ''connotation'', I'll only use that word, oftentimes stopping mid-sentence to pause to find the word with just the right shade of meaning I want to convey -- even if I know a word with the same denotation that would get the point across just as well.

I assume the above poster meant "correct denotation" as "denotation" refers to the definitive meaning of a word, as opposed to the most oft-conveyed meaning... but I digress.

Original troper here (the one with the "ubiquitous plastic bags" story). I have a friend (and not in the IHaveThisFriend sense) who averts this trope entirely. He's the smartest person I know by far -- he's got at ''least'' 20-30 IQ points on me (see, told you this wasn't IHaveThisFriend), yet I've almost never heard him use a long word when a short one will do. In fact, if you just listened to how he speaks and didn't pay attention to the ''content'' of what he's saying, you'd be excused for thinking he was "slow". He speaks quite slowly, with frequent pauses where you can tell he's trying to find words to express the concepts in his head in a way that his listeners will be able to grasp. But if you have the patience to wait for him to finish a sentence, you'll usually be blown away by the depth of his insight. It's quite humbling, actually. And it also reminds me that many people who ''deliberately'' use SesquipedalianLoquaciousness, to try to verbally bully their audience and establish a kind of dominance over them, are usually not nearly as confident in their intelligence as they want you to believe. The really confident ones know they have nothing to prove, and don't need to play dominance games.

This troper did it intentionally, using Dictionary.com and similar resources to get into character for playing a 20-Intelligence wizard in a D&D game. For the extent of the campaign and a few weeks after it was impossible to stop. It's since abated, but has a tendency to resurge at the most inopportune moments.

Being a MotorMouth, this troper generally doesn't ''talk'' in this fashion, but when writing or typing she generally reverts to a much more formal style with more complex words and grammatical structures. This gave some of her friends difficulty when she IMs; they all think they're being pranked because she uses SAT-level words liberally throughout the text.

Apparentally this troper does it too, and to a lesser extent on the Life}} meatplane. I say 'apparentally' because my vocabulary, in my opinion, is... is... elementary.

Remember that an "elementary" vocabulary among young Americans (I'm using as narrow a grouping as I feel I can) excludes any word beyond the three-syllable mark.

Taken from a forum I frequent: #QUOTE# Eschew Obfuscation! #QUOTE# This disquisition of dissertation\\ Circuitous frippery, ostentation,\\ Paradigm shiftless bring consternation\\ Bewildering perplexity of stupefaction,\\ Yet altogether miscellaneous debris arcane.\\ Erudite in its exhibition,\\ Abortive though in edifition,\\ And cavalier in admonition,\\ A self-exaltation of perspicacity;\\ Its perusal is a literary pain.\\ Thereupon it's recommended\\ To have this fustian riot ended\\ Lest cant palaver agelessly bended,\\ Our lexicon imperiled;\\ Convoluted apparatus of communication slain.\\ Elucidation therefore touted\\ However hopelessly rerouted\\ Resorting then bedlam saluted,\\ Discounting pother incolloquial,\\ One may consent this lyric entertain.\\ Acknowledge august this linguistics,\\ As articles projected ballistics,\\ Appreciate facetious mystics.\\ Despite abandonment in comprehension,\\ Though superlatively illucid, neglect to complain.\\ Subsistence's concernment aggrandized\\ In peculiarity unrealized;\\ Coherence instanced, characterized;\\ How one modulates adjudicates\\ The ipseity, personified, they retain.\\ This expatiation, this peroration,\\ This circumlocutory narration,\\ Merely marrow demonstration\\ Present aberrant aptitude fustian,\\ Endeavoring adequately auspiciously to subsume iterate lexemes deviant perspicacious vexatious labyrinthine to apperceptions mediocre agnate to persnickety, nomothetic, transdisciplinarium, all paraphernalia requiring denotation sought lest cognizance unattained, and fabricated in semi-iambic constitution providing adroit if asymmetrical cadence, audiences extol aesthetics however contort at plethoric recrementitious prodigal pleonasm paramount, confloption commotion ensuant due to unexpressed though prevalent requests to conjecture English lore austere and just plain plain.\\

This troper thinks he understood many 20 words from that.

Don't worry, this troper is pretty sure he understood most of the words but I still am not sure what the above troper said.

Gawrsh, they couldn't have made it any clearer.:[[FamilyGuy Ohhh, is funny because is not clear at all!]]

Use big words. It confuses people. Simple as that.

^ To clarify, I think the above troper was explaining what it said... anyway, it's the same as I got from it, but because I understood maybe half of it, it makes me feel... uninformed. Thanks to that, I will be up half the night cramming until I know both that quote by heart, and the definition of every word in it... a lifetime of that is what led me to this page. XD

Gave me a freaking headache, but I knew the positive majority of that hella of a poem. The first couple of lines blow my mind though particularly.

It's saying that people need to just say what they mean and to hell with trying to hide what you want to say behind nuance and unnecessary wordplay. At least, I'm pretty sure that's what it says.

This troper is prone to this. She frequently has te define words for her mother, friends, and at one point, her ''teacher''. I had used the word "coolth" on a fifth-grade writing assignment, and she sent it back and told me it wasn't a word. She was wrong.

This troper is fond of the phrase "I dislike you with great intensity."

This troper prefers the phrase taught by his mother: "How dare you insinuate that I should tolerate such diabolical impudence from an insolent pup like you!". Used to great effect on several nigh-illiterate classmates in the past.

This trope has a fondness for it; he has a habit of mixing it with insults to force his classmates to go through the dictionary to work out the meaning of said insults; on another note, this habit evolved from a speech impediment this trope still possesses - he simply finds it easier to pronounce the lengthened words of their shortened counterparts. He has also spread this to several of his classmates; he is also mocked when he does not understand a word (for instance, not believing "exemplar" was a word).

This trope is a major part of why this troper loathes studying anatomy. Let's face it, any subject in which "above" requires five syllables is doing it wrong. (In anatomy "inferior", "superior", "anterior", "posterior", "lateral" and "medial" are used instead of the far more comprehensible "down", "up", "front", "back", "out" and "in". Now You Know.)

IBlameCommunism isn't really this trope at all. Okay, maybe he's fond of extended metaphor, maybe his vocabulary is pretty big, but any educated person ought to understand what he's saying and he actually favours the short and Anglo-Saxon in many circumstances. He is therefore entirely mystified at his friends being able to identify him by his words when he is out of sight and assuming an outrageously overblown Russian accent.

ThisTroper likes to contort the phrase: "Not on my Watch!" into: "Not on my Chronograph!"

...Except that's not the correct "watch"... :p

This troper will frequently do this sometimes. The people I talk to are mostly smart enough to realize what I'm trying to say, but I'll sometimes be asked "What does that mean?" I even went to Europe with a kid that spoke that way too!

This troper was fond of "encephalomyelitis" in sixth grade.

This troper apparently started using words like peculiar correctly around the age of 3, and it's only gotten worse.

This troper's friends ask her not to explain Philosophy before a test. They ask for a translator or don't ask at all.

YonTroper has a definite propensity towards extraneous verbosity, due to his tendency to assimilate unfamiliar verbiage into his everyday vocabulary. He is well aware of the ramifications of such, having induced a certain collective of adolescent tormentors into sending the extremities of their upper limbs into his genitalia. Good thing he can stop if he wants.

This troper does this. Guess how people react[GIFT]...

This Troper was once told by her mother that if someone were to ask me for the time, I'd tell them how to build a clock.

This troper, convinced she killed her stuffed toy fox by drowning her in the bathtub, was so distraught that her babysitter put the fox in the dryer to appease her. After waiting the entire time it took to desiccate the toy in front of the machine, she then joyously exclaimed in various ways how Foxy was now resuscitated, revitalized and reincarnated. Her babysitter loves telling this story. Needless to say, she entered kindergarten with a third grade reading level, and her verbal dictionary has only escalated from there.

This troper has noticed that many people who fall in to the SesquipedalianLoquaciousness category, especially those who invoke the trope intentionally, tend to ''do it wrong''. Instead, they sound like walking thesauruses, since they frequently ignore the contextual shifts that happen with words like this, causing them to choose words whose general implications no longer fit with the synonymous word they are attempting to replace. This troper would caution all who seek to evoke this trope to be careful lest you sound like someone's run your dialog through Microsoft Word's thesaurus-replace tool.

This troper once did this in a class discussion. We had to reword old phrases, and came up with "Terminate multiple ornithological specimens utilizing a single geological specimen.

This male troper is like this at times, since he likes to use the most accurate word possible, although over the years he's learned to tone it down. Except when he's drunk, oddly enough, where he gives a lot of the fictional examples a run for their money.

Not on the same level as a lot of the above examples, but when in elementary school, she used the word "thrice" in a story. Apparently that's abnormal.

This troper went through a phase of this in the cusp of his burgeoning youth.

This troper doesn't do this very much, as he uses words that are only moderately hard to understand. He still gets people asking for the meaning of the word, though.

As a child this troper was really bad about this and didn't realize it until he was put in a public school for the first time and had to tone it down. Now I use it mostly when I get pissed to try to make people feel stupid in {{Reason You Suck}} speeches

This troper has always a rather extensive vocabulary. I first reached a college reading level at the age of 10. I read Lord of the Rings when I was 12. It's paid off - one of my high school English teachers pulled a TakeThat on the class by reading one of Eisenhower's State of the Union speeches. She claimed that language in official speeches had been dumbed down since then and none of us would understand the speech because of it. To be a smartass, I defined every word she asked us the definition for. She had to ask me to stop answering.

Tested at a college reading level at 9 over here -- depending on the type of teacher they'd either let this troper go on for 15 minutes and enjoy the break or glower and start pointedly ignoring the lone hand waving in the air. You might think a 3rd grade teacher would be inclined to like a student who wanted to discuss ''MacBeth'' for her book report, or at least encouraging... you'd be wrong.

As I learned the hard way (also), teachers don't appreciate students who--inadvertently, or otherwise--perpetually remind everyone (including their classmates) they're smarter than the teacher. Typical reaction is being made the object of derision, often. Or worse.

This Troper can't help but use this in everyday speech. Sometimes to the confusion of those around him.

This Troper often writes sales/advertising speech or ads for fake political parties or churches using this. A fun way to spend a boring class.

This Troper uses this now and then. TV Tropes helped, but even before the Troper in question came here, he was rather sesquipedalian, much to the chagrin of his colleagues. He plans to write an English essay that which his teacher will need to have a dictionary on hand for marking eventually.

Hold up, I remembered an amazing example. The class was defining "epitome" for the spelling list. The definition put forth was "ultimate example". I was against this, claiming that ultimate technically meant "last". It does also mean what it should mean in the context, but shush.

This Troper tends to choose words and phrases when writing based on how exactly they convey what he means to say. This often results in passages which switch jarringly from an overly informal tone to pseudo-latin wall-of-text SpockSpeak. In mid sentence.

This troper doesn't talk, type or write like this, but he can read it. Which means he's generally the translator in these situations.

The reason why this troper's ''Fachbereichsarbeit'' (a scientific work you can do for your final exams in austria) is about 6 pages too long. But it looks so awesome with all those sophisticated phrases and words....

This troperette is a teenager. When either mad, freaked out or excited, she will utilize this trope and trump an English major with the words she uses. Unluckily, she gets mad very often...

While this troper enjoys overutilising the language by which he has become renowned for (that would be English). He prefers more often to experiment within the bounds of said language, with words used in contexts perhaps beyond the scope of their idiom. Being not only an English Literature student, but also a writer, this manifests in many ways, often to the frustration both of his professors and his Microsoft Word spellchecker. To be more precise, It can be great fun to go over the top sometimes, but unless there really is no other way of expressing the point, I will use shorter expressions, layman's terms, and while my language is undoubtedly complex and latinate, it is not impenetrable. Unfortunately this has also led to a situation as one described above, in which a piece of university work was handed in, returned covered in red ink, resubmitted with the only change having been use of the thesarus function on MW, and the red ink mysteriously vanished. When confronted with this, my tutor agreed there had been a mistake, and since then there has been a campaign started within the English Department for the acceptance of plain English in essays and written submissions.

You know that one guy who always hangs around you and your friends, except that nobody really likes him? One of my friends repelled him by telling him that he had to stay away until he could figure out, interestingly enough, what ''SesquipedalianLoquaciousness'' meant.

This troper maintains this affliction to a horrific extent. Furthermore, it's genetic- and when you combine my mother's extensive vocabulary with my father's IncrediblyLamePuns, you get advanced literacy jokes that confound my peers and baffle my tutors. To further compound the issue, I am a pedantic grammar fascist, turning me into a teacher's worst nightmare during English class.

This troper is largely unintelligible to her peers and is quite sesquipedalian, but people can still understand what she's talking about. Some of the sixth formers at this troper's school, however, are this trope incarnate and taken up to eleven.

This troper likes to use some long/indirect versions of words instead of straighter ones. Most notable when he injured a finger and described the occasion where it happened as a "frontal collision with the club's floor" (partially because he hit both hands, a knee/shin, an elbow and the hip in the "crash", so "falling" would be too soft a description).

SunnyV does this often, usually by accident. Sometimes words like "arbitrary" just come to her mind sooner (and are closer to the meaing she wants to convey.)

Averted with this troper. People think that since she's been reading at a college reading level from a young age, she should speak with an advanced vocabulary, but instead speaks plainly or peppers her speech with BuffySpeak. She does know plenty of big, fancy sounding words but sees no point in using them when most won't know their meaning and it only comes off sounding pretentious when nine times out of ten simpler words work just as well.

This troper didn't really consider herself to be one of these, but apparently is. I've been told by others that talking to me is hilarious because "it's like talking to a thesaurus" and as a staff writer for my high school yearbook this past year, my copy writing was often sent back to be rewritten because "it sounded too smart." Comraderie is just too big a word for some people I guess. Yet when the other staff writers needed an interesting word for their copies I was always the person they asked after.

When prompted justly, This Troper will use this trope in arguement, be written or spoken. Sometimes to confuse people, other times just because he enjoys it.

This Troper prefers to use long words over short words, although he won't say "I've caused potential collateral damage to my hand by impacting it against the door", he'll just say something like "ow". Understandably, it annoys a friend of mine who prefers me to use words with less than four letters. Probably justified, since I read War of the Worlds (and a few other science fiction books, along with books on fungi) when I was ten and managed to understand everything in it. Once played for laughs, in that I deliberately made sure I was using the longest words I could manage. Said friend nearly had a BSOD (justified, though: he's epileptic).

This troper was once describing himself. Among the first things to come, quite naturally, to mind were "a tendency towards excessively verbose self-expression." Difficulties in socialization have been frequent, as the schools he's gone to have ever been significantly below-average for the state, in a state already below national average, in terms of test scores. Interestingly, I suck at Scrabble: my ''active'' vocabulary (''shudder'', I hate that phrase) is terribly and irritatingly small.

Sometimes, this troper uses big words. A (rather BookDumb) bully from JuniorHigh and HighSchool would constantly ask her, "Why do you talk like a scientist?!" Well, now as a biology major (graduating this spring), she can tell him if she ever runs into him again, "Oh, Gee, I dunno. Maybe it's because I *am* one!"

0dd1: In my ethics class last term, we read a book about relativism that was an egregious victim of this trope. It doesn't end there, though. We had to answer questions about the book as we went along, with conclusion questions (about our opinion, etc.) at the end. I elected to answer my conclusion questions as an essay. My essay also suffered greatly from this trope, but only because I made my entire essay be about just how confusingly the authors wrote the book. (I think the joke went over my teacher's head.)

This Troper is often accused of sounding 'pretentious' by her brothers (and her enriched-english classmates, and non-english teachers sadly...) due to her habit of talking in patterns more akin to the writing of a lengthy and erudite paper than of every day discussion. It makes it quite difficult for her when it comes to speaking other languages where she isn't experienced enough to use more vibrant language. Somewhat subverted by her friends who can easily out do her but often favor less pedantic speech.

Guilty as charged. This tropette A. always extends her vocabulary anyway as a song-writer and B. always uses percise and definite terms for EVERYTHING, like I say "I think 55.2% that is probable". She'd also just say horrendous instead of horrible. Illicit instead of illigal and self-evident instead of obvious and ostracized instead of isolated. Those are just off the top of her head. It suprises people who think she's dumb when she utilizes humoungous words like that. She just likes vocabulary work in general. Always been like this.

Not sure how far I count in this category, but I did have a moment a few days ago when I was fed up with a friend of mine whining about how everyone sucks (which if you think about it is really rude to say to your FRIEND who's trying to COMFORT you) and so I flat out told her that I was fed up with her misanthropic views and distrust. After a long pause, she asked me what misanthropic meant. The fact that she's a self-proclaimed genius gave me a little smugness to my tone when I defined it for her. Especially since, for me, misanthropy isn't really a commonplace word, but most people I talk to know what it means.

I sometimes do this in English... but I do this all the time in Dutch. It helps that Dutch can be a fairly simple language and words often used in English are far less common in Dutch.

I speak normally around my friends, but was making use of the word "paraskevidekatriaphobia" (fear of Friday the 13th) around grade 2 or 3 and still have the habit of making my essays and written parts of school projects far longer and more eloquent than they should be.

Averted for this troper, who got chewed out by his prof for using the word "shibboleth" in an essay.

This troper is kind of a subversion, since her English is self-taught through books and the internet so she's much better at it than her (German) class but doesn't always remember what she's "supposed" to know, so her classmates think that she uses this (also the same situation with Russian which she learned from some relatives). She plays it slightly straighter in Hebrew, where she uses ''a lot'' of foreign words or the newly-invented ones that never really caught on, because compared to other languages she knows, everyday hebrew just doesn't have enough words. Her improving English skills also lead to an annoying habit (which sometimes fits in this trope, but not always) that kicks in when she can't find a fitting Hebrew word: getting stuck in the middle of a sentence and trying to find a Hebrew equalent to a word that exists in English, not finding one because it doesn't exist, and either using an English or scientistic term which may or may not be valid in Hebrew or inserting a long sentence to explain exactly what I meant.

This troper had a pretty big vocabulary when she was a kid, but was sure that everybody had more or less caught up to her once she started high school - until she got a boyfriend who was highly intelligent and astonishingly well-read that complained that she used long and tricky words all the time.

Facebookians...like it: http://acelike.com/409282.html

This troper plays this straight. One time he was talking to one of his friends when he said I talked too smart because I used words like "thus" in everyday conversation. Also, whenever this troper writes he tends to lean in this direction. Of course whenever somebody tells him this he just smiles and says "Wohoo, I'm smarticals." What, the expressions are hilarious!

This troper uses large, complicated words on a daily basis (much to the chagrin of her classmates, who seem to have never read a book willingly). She has been told to "talk more like a teenager", and has tried. She failed.

As a result of spending two years on the Speech and Debate team and a lifetime of prolific reading (including government documents...oh God), this troper occasionally indulges in SesquipedalianLoquaciousness, although he tries to make sure it doesn't impair comprehension. He only consciously does it for the humor value.

This troper once read the dictionary after I was forbidden from reading my beloved HarryPotter books my by rather uncaring fourth-grade teacher. Though already quite loquacious by that point (having been reading HarryPotter on my own since I was eight), at least for a nine-ten year old, I was far moreso by the end of that year. This was to a great magnitude of frustration from my less-leanred classmates. however, I was gobsmacked by one of my classmates, and I then knew what it was like to be everyone else and have no bloody idea what was being said (or addressed. Had there not been visuals, the whole SesquipedalianLoquaciousness presentation would have gone right over me. As it was, I'm still not sure what he was saying).

This Tropette has always been this for as long as she can recall. I self-taught myself to read at three (No, I am NOT making that up) and was reading college textbooks by seven or eight. I excelled in English and as a result I have an insanely high vocabulary even now that I am in college. I also write, so I mainly use this glut of linguistic knowledge to write stories and poems, including Fanfics. In real life I'm very well-spoken, but a lot more foul-mouthed and less prone to the use of huge words than you might think. It is ''really'' funny when I say something and nobody understands it, though.

This troper voraciously assimilates vocabulary. In his younger days his peers were quick to request "small words, please," but things improved in his adult life through accreting an audience which had in each member a better grasp of the breadth and depth of English, a greater skill at semantic inference, or a predisposition to quietly ignore those things not understood. He tends to use allegory to describe foreign concepts to new people, since it cuts down on his use of engineering jargon. This troper wants to encourage all the young logomonomaniacal Tropers out there to treat language as your plaything as though you had the biggest box of Legos in your neighborhood (which in this case, is accurate), and especially to self-describe with the word "sesquipedalian" as an ambiguous double entendre in response to comments about your ''diction''.

This troper frequently uses the most complex words he knows, as well as throwing in four-character compounds and proverbs when speaking Japanese. Not so much when he's speaking his native English though.

This troper use english word in swedish. Not as in a blatant case ofmeanings with two languages, but rather, so to speak, Derives english words into swedish. Such as Enamoured = Enamorerad. Propinquity = Propinqvitet Et cetera. ANd since hte words already means something, i can easily explain to the bemused listeners what they meant.

This troper does this unintentionally...at first. Then when somebody asks him to dumb down his language, he will occasionally take it up to eleven instead. He's known to have an eccentric personality type which may account for some of the incoherant vocabulary.

Which later led to my attempt to avert this trope by playing my Nascar and football Fandom to eleven, due to the stereotype that only dumb rednecks like Nascar, and trying to portray a Dumb Jock. Then I began talking about Nascar from a research and development point of view, stating the performance and safety technology derived directly from Auto Racing, inadvertantly averting my attemted aversion.

This troper had an argument with a postmodernist online whose posts were full of Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness. Eventually, I didn't even bother to read his posts because they were full of tl;dr jargon.

This troper's Civics and Economics teacher is very guilty of this. This troper is as well, learning a majority of her larger words from him.

This troper, being a bookworm, does this in spades, but only in writing. She remembers getting into arguments with her primary school teachers over this frequently (and often winning, once after her equally-guilty-of-this mother quoted a dictionary at said teacher). Now that she's entered a school focused on research ''and'' discovered TV Tropes, she doesn't think it's going to abate anytime soon. Also, much of what others consider to be this trope are perfectly legible to her, if a little too purple.

Ah a fine moment came where me and my psychology teacher were having a conversation and due to our massive egos we started using our more sophisticated vocabulary.A poor innocent bystander was trying to follow the conversation her eyes darting back and forth like it was a tennis game and she said one of us had to leave because she couldn't understand what we were saying. I agreed and left when this trope came to mind and told him "she can't stand our sesquipedalian loquaciousness" he looked at me for a moment and laughed "oh god I know what that means"

This troper does this in certain situations. Since she has found that questions and comments in "simple English" are misunderstood with alarming frequency, she modifies her language to be as precise as possible. This worked when she was at her home university, but when she took classes at the local community college for a semester (long story), she had the opposite problem. Her one instructor took her aside and requested what was essentially, a "dumbing down" of her speech, comments, and questions. When writing, she prefers precise and concise language, and usually says in one page what her peers say in two. She's better outside academia, where being exactly correct does not seem as important. Though if you get her discussing an issue or a delicate topic...

This troper once found out that she has a desire on this, and decided to avoid it. A minor incident occured at Topsail Island of North Carolina when one of two cousins of her family jokingly expected her to speak a fancy word for dumb, saying that she's a dictionary, even though she doesn't want to.

This Troper knows a girl who's prone to this. In a forum somewhere (I don't know where, I only heard about this from her sister) she wrote two Wall Of Text-sized paragraphs on how technology is changing society. The next poster replied simply with "I like turtles" and this link.

My school has a lot of international students, mostly from Asian countries, with varying degrees of English skills, but rarely anyone with the capacity to use abnormally obtuse vocabulary in their vernacular. Thus, my English teacher would us this trope (as well as crossing over into ShlubbAndKlumpEnglish) popping up in the work of students who rarely strung together a confident sentence whilst talking as an easy way to tell if students were simply copypasting in their assignments.

But it also brings up another point, in that teachers often tell you to make your writing more interesting by using a thesaurus. Yet when you do use words seemingly "too smart" for you, you're accused of cheating. Quite the quandary.

This is HOW I TALK. Everyone treats me like a freak, constantly says "Boy, I doooone which you" whenever I use the term.. Well... Term. Everyone also uses me as a human spellchecker/dictionary. I am truly, surely, exasperated like a discombobulated herring of the way they treat my behavioral instinctive language enhancments.

At, of all places, an Indiana University football game, I met a couple people who did this with the lyrics of songs, not to sound pretentious, but merely for the amusement. They called it "Musical Exposition," and is much more fun than it sounds.

I just can't help it. I've talked like this since I was a little kid. And it's kinda justfied, since I was diagnosed with Schizotypical Personality Disorder, which forces me to talk like that.