[contradistinct]

> I think it's interesting how different people view status, like the "Harvard Professor or Homeless guy?" quiz that used to get passed around.

This is counter-signalling. "I don't have to dress like a high-status individual, because I'm so high status that my high status is clear either way." It's why somewhat intelligent people use big words, but very intelligent people speak plainly: they are so intelligent their intelligence is clear even without the big words, and they want you to know that.

[411111111111111]

Intelligence is generally correlated with the size of their vocabulary thought.

This is obliviously just a rule of thumb but if you take a pool of 100 well spoken individuals and 100 ... Not well spoken and then give them all some kind of intelligence test, the first group will definitely score significantly higher then the latter.

Yes, I'm aware that non native speaker (I am one of these), but they'd be statistically irrelevant in the context of the general population

[skhm]

Maybe I need to stop using “tautological”, “orthogonal”, etc in my speech… they are so ingrained into me from academic settings but in hindsight and in a professional context there are definitely people politely nodding and either thinking “I’ll look that up later” - or more commonly they’ll know the words just fine and instead it’s “why not just say ‘obvious’ / ‘unrelated’ / etc”.

I like trying to be precise but I think it’s coming at the cost of actual understanding/conveying the wrong status-signal (I don’t want an elitist vibe at work either!)

[leaflets2]

Or extra words and fancy words are just a waste of everyone's time.

What are some big words? I'm not a native speaker