People who think they’re an intellectual by using fringe words like “irascible” and “quixotic”

Yawn

We don't think we're an intellectual but we do think you're a little sad for not understanding words.

Are there any proper contexts in which such words can be used, and are there any people who use such words well in those contexts?

What a cromulent thing to say.

And as I expect you know, not all intellectuals are intelligent, and not all intelligent people are intellectuals.

So those are the words that Biden is stumbling on when he glitches while reading his teleprompter in 1260-size font!

Woke

Such a curmudgeon you are.

Stop tilting at windmills.

Do you have a penchant for grandiloquent elocution?

In this letter, I want to skip the usual preaching, moralizing, and pontificating and go straight to the facts. As I’m sure you’re aware, Mr. DamnFrauds has been fighting hard to replace Robert’s Rules of Order with facilitated consensus building at all important meetings. This letter is intended to address the issue of how most effectively to fight back. Our choice of strategy is critical because DamnFrauds’s rantings are based on a technique I’m sure you’ve heard of. It’s called "gaslighting".

When was the last time you heard DamnFrauds mention that it pains me to avoid profanity in describing his thrasonical, spleeny memoirs? Probably never. That’s why he insists that we have too much freedom. Go home, DamnFrauds; you’re drunk. Any sober person would realize that DamnFrauds may be evil, but he’s not stupid. He knows he’ll never get away with resolving a moral failure with an immoral solution, at least not any time soon. If he tried, the whole world would know that his overweening ploys often resemble an inverted fairy tale in that the triumph of innocence comes at the start and the ugly sisters of quibbleism and mammonism enter on stage in triumph for the final curtain.

When you read a lot and look up every word that you don’t know, using a large vocabulary comes naturally.

Just last week I used the term “cognitive dissonance “ in a conversation, and I could tell that a couple of people thought that I was trying to sound smart, but I wasn’t. Of course I AM smart, but I was not trying to flaunt it.

Your vexation over the arcane lexemes of others seems to denote a certain disequilibrium with your own perspicacity.

You have to use “flaunt” when you mean “flout” to be able to both flaunt your intelligence and prove your independent thinking by flouting convention .

(but we may have hit ignoramus critical mass on that one so that it’s now deemed a new alternate conventional form)

These people are the ones with smooth digestive systems.

Convention we shall flout

and the rules throw out.

Our wits we will flaunt

and witless fools we’ll daunt.