What are some words you slip into everyday conversation to make yourself sound smart. Strangely, words as common as “amalgamate” often do the trick…it seems a lot of people don’t even know what that means.
There aren’t any. There are words that I use on a regular basis that aren’t commonly used, but none that I regularly use to ‘sound smart’.
I have admitted here before that I’ll occasionally find one to use on purpose because it amuses me when English majors don’t know them, but I can’t think of any particular ones that I’ve done that with.
Such an endeavor is doomed to failure. You’ll almost certainly come off as a pretentious idiot or an Archie Bunker imitator.
I assume the OP is being facetious. The OP of course knows what “facetious” means, right?
I use a word that don’t mean nothing, like looptid.
Duh.
Nothing, really. I don’t want to sound intelligent, I want to be clear. If you’re clear you sound intelligent without trying.
I should probably add “unless you’re clearly full of shit.”
Well when I want to sound smart I tend to eschew obfuscation.
It amuses me when working with the kids in my preschool class to accustom them to hearing quotes from classical literature. It is not just individual words that make us sound smart, but how we string them together. If you are following the thread about what goes on in elite preschools, here is another one of the perks. I recommend the following quotes:
“Be excellent to each other.”
“Ruh-roh” (Not sure how Mr. Doo spells this foreign term)
“Now you know. And knowing is half the battle.”
“What is a fire and why does it, what’s the word… burn?”
“Oh dear, Johnny has fallen, and he can’t get up!”
etc.
Methodology. I used to use that word all the time to sound smart. Of course, I probably came off as a dumbass.
I used to work for a chemical company. Most of the chemicals we produced are more commonly referred to by their acronyms. If you really wanted to sound smart, you would use their full names in conversations.
Not me but someone I used to work with. We hired some guy to do our disaster recovery plan.
First time I went to meet him in his office I walked in and saw on his whiteboard:
eschew obfuscation.
I laughed and he told me that I was the only person that had laughed at it. We have been friends since then.
Yeah, but I just don’t have it in my Deoxyribonucleic acid to do that.
Wow, you sound like a professor and shit.
Cromulent.
Reminds me of this guy I used to work with who couldn’t say more than 10 words without slipping in paradigm.
He’d say, “I’m just trying to find the paradigm.” “Do you think that’s the paradim?” “I’m challenging the system to find the paradigm.” “Once I identify the paradigm, . . .” It got to the point the others couldn’t look at each other when he was talking, because we’d make each other laugh.
fecund
sanguine…but mostly because of the Firefly exchange.
“Everything ok?”
“Sanguine, sir”
“What’s that mean?”
“Peaceful. It can also mean bloody.”
"Well that kinda covers all the options doesn’t it.
“Your zilch coil is burned out.”
You win, sir.