[Symbiote]

My parents made a similar deal with me, when I was 18.

"Manual work" for all but 3 weeks of the summer was indoors for me, in factories -- mostly cleaning and assembling. There was a good range of jobs, from boring, tough work more-or-less alone, to a place where everyone seemed to chat while they worked slowly as the summer was usually a quiet period.

In the final job, I took a half-day off to collect my exam results. Going into work afterwards, people naturally asked what they were ­-- all A grades. It was difficult not to feel apart from many of the staff from that point. The owner's daughter was the same age and also working the summer at the factory, and her results weren't good enough to go to university.

[Ensorceled]

Did you ever get a "Hey, don't be using twenty dollar words in a twenty-five cent conversation." That was a wake up call.

[Symbiote]

That sounds fairly confrontational to me.

I only had phrases like "look at you with your fancy words", which (in Britain, depending on tone) can mean something from "I'm impressed you remember words like that", to "I don't understand you" and "you seem to think you're better than me".