How do you think I feel-now I’ve got to change my answer!
I was learned how to tawk real good and thats how I tawk naow.
I’d tell yous, but then I’d have to kills yous.
I use whatever language is necessary for the purpose at hand.
Because of a love of reading, I’ve had a large vocabulary since I was a child, winning spelling contests and impressing teachers along the way. But when I went into the military, I soon became aware that being able to speak well was considered somehow to be “elitist”. People often told me that they thought I was talking down to them, when that was never my intent. Words that I always thought were common usage apparently baffled the average enlisted guy. After awhile I began to dumb down my conversation as a defense mechanism, unless speaking to officers or other superiors.
Some people think I talk complete bollocks. Does that count? 
I love words, and I know a rather large number of them. I finally found out, though, that big or obscure words get in the way of communication. At the first puzzling word, I can see a listener’s knitted brow. At the second fancy word, the guy with the wrinkled brow stops listening. I gained nothing by flaunting my arsenal of amazing words.
To quote an old friend, “I know more big words than you do. So what?” I learned a lot when he said that.
I honestly have no idea.
I have an issue, wherein when I’m talkign with folks, after a while I am mimicing their speech patterns, including verbage and accent. It’s gotten me in trouble more than a few times.
That being said, outside of my close group of friends (whom I will entertain for hours with long winded discourse on the most stupid subjects imaginable), I tend to not talk much.
Like most people here, I share the adept-childhood-reader-oops-large-vocabulary-gets-you-no-girls-in-high-school-so-I-better-dumb-it-down story. My spoken vocabulary trends back towards those unnecessarily long words if I’m upset or extremely tired.
Lots of antisocial and introverted people can acquire a mental dictionary of polysyllabic show-off words. However, I have much more respect for those that can speak and compose succinctly and effectively to their target audience with no extraneous fat.
Scientific writing has helped me immensely in this regard.
Hahahaa! I wonder how many nerds are out there ‘dumbing it down’ for the poor normals, thinking everyone else is dumb. Everyone else has just learned not to use words that aren’t needed for the subject matter being discussed.
If you are at a party and the topic is nachos, you probably can holster your big guns. If you find those same people discussing philosophy on the bleachers on campus, it’s probably safe to shift into Professor McWordsmith mode.
ETA: this post was not directed at the poster above me. It is a thought that randomly entered my head after looking at the whole thread.
I’ve fooled a lot of people into thinking I’m a genius, and it’s only partly because of my vocabulary. I actually listen to what people say and ask questions based on what I hear. The real clincher is that I know enough basic terminology about almost any subject matter I encounter to sprinkle them into my questions. That convinces folks I know a whole lot more than I actually do.
And then they’re much more forgiving when I let loose all the crazy shit later.
Mmmmm. Nachos.
I’m a jargon junkie too and sometimes it can be dangerous - seriously. For example when I talk to my doctor I try to use the correct terminology, but then he thinks it’s ok to talk to me in doctorese. At that point I feel the donut glaze spreading across my corneas.
I can speak at the level of the person. However, if I’m using a word or term that the person might not be familiar with, then I’ll explain it in the conversation using examples. I have problems in two areas. The first area is in my writing where I tend to use British spellings (the drawback of having a library card at a young age), but spell check catches them for me. The second is when I speak Spanish as my father and his parents speak Castellano/Castillian, which he taught me. The rest of my family speaks what you can call street Spanish. Supposedly, it does make a difference with some people, the way people think you sound more respectable speaking with a British accent.
The problem is that unless you are extremely good at reading people, you never know whether to take the high road, the low road or some other road entirely.
Some people are going to be offended by your condescension if you try to explain to them words they already understand. How arrogant of you to assume that they don’t know what something means. Pfftt!
Other people will think you’re being haughty if you DON’T try to explain what you mean.
Still other people are going to think you’re a pretentious douche if you even use a few words that in their opinion aren’t sufficiently common.
So, no matter what approach you take, if you take it consistently, you are guaranteed to piss off some percentage of your audience. If you suck at reading people and you try to change up to suit your audience, then, like me, you’ll most likely pick exactly the wrong approach with frightening accuracy.
I’ve had lots of conversations where I’ve had to downgrade my vocabulary because the person I’m talking to doesn’t know the words that I would otherwise have considered appopriate for the situation. Hell, I got told off for using the word ‘fickle’ as if that were unusual.
But I don’t know much about sport, so I’d need a bit of dumbing down there myself. I paused for a moment over the word ‘bleachers’ because we don’t use that word in the UK so it didn’t process as automatically as the other words.
People who read a lot tend to have a bigger bagful of appropriate words to dip into than people who don’t; it’d be a bit weird if they didn’t. They’re not being superior by changing their language any more than a keen sportsman is when they slow down to jog alongside a friend who only exercises once in a while.
*Yeah, you can expand your vocabulary in other ways - ways which are also available to voracious readers - but a medium that requires solely on words to communicate obviously uses a wider range of words than other media.
Mmmmmm… eye donut glaze…
I am very intelligent, have a great vocabulary and write very well.
However, the glitch between my brain and my mouth is so bad that some peope meeting me for the first time wonder if I am mentally impaired. I was given an I Q test in first grade to determine if I was retarded, and scored 148.
IRL, I have a reputation for being a man of few words. I choose words that let me say my piece as succinctly as possible.
So you ARE retarded. 
ok, just compared to me.