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Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness
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alt title(s): Really Long Word; Big Words
Sesquipedalian: A long word, or characterized by the use of long words. From the Latin roots meaning "a foot and a half long."
Loquaciousness: being talkative, gabby.
A predilection by the intelligentsia to engage in the manifestation of prolix exposition through a buzzword disposition form of communication notwithstanding the availability of more comprehensible diminutive alternatives.
In brief: "smart" characters using long words when short ones would be better. Characters afflicted with this trait often seem to go out of their way to over-complicate their speech, probably because writers think that this is the only way to show that someone is more intelligent than the average writer. This could also be the trait of a particularly anal-retentive character who always has to be right, the trait extending so far that the character always has to use exactly the right word — never using "blue" when "azure" would be more accurate, for example.
Occasionally such characters may drop the long words if things get particularly dire, to emphasize just how bad things are (in the same way as a Sarcasm Failure). Alternatively, they may get even more wordy as they get more emotional, leading to increasingly detailed but ultimately incoherent ranting.
Ironically, Williams Syndrome can lead to this kind of behavior. People with Asperger's Syndrome may do this in an attempt to be as precise as possible, ironically making their oratorical sonorities too pleonastic to be expeditiously assimilated.
One of the symptoms of Spock Speak. Usually also a Motor Mouth. See also Expospeak Gag, Antiquated Linguistics, Sophisticated As Hell, and Department Of Redundancy Department. If someone tries for this and can't get the words right, they're perpetrating Shlubb And Klump English. If the author commits this, it is a form of Purple Prose. Often takes advantage of the fact that Talking Is A Free Action. The word Antidisestablishmentarianism is almost guaranteed to show up as well.
It's worth noting that there is a word for the fear of long words; ironically, it's "sesquipedalophobia" often exaggerated by people into "hippomonstrosesquippedaliophobia".
Big Words redirects here, for those of us who prefer to avert this trope in Real Life. Contrast the Laconic Wiki. Also note that the similarity to Techno Babble.
Examples
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Japanese animation and sequential graphic novels
- Leeron in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann frequently does this after the Time Skip, with "short versions" inevitably following after he loses his audience.
- Lordgenome's Head is pretty bad at this too.
- Genshiken uses this for its Idiosyncratic Episode Naming.
- This is done as if the episodes were a college thesis paper; it's done for the whole first season — hinted to by done by the President (who might or might not have cameras hidden everywhere) — while more normal episode naming is done during season two.
- Yue of Mahou Sensei Negima tends to do this on occasion.
- Ulqiorra in the Viz Media translation of Bleach flaunts his vocabulary in almost every conversation.
Western sequential graphic novels
- Shlubb and Klump (a.k.a. Fat Man and Little Boy) from Sin City indulge in this type of dialogue in an attempt to look intelligent. However, they tend to mix a fair amount of a malapropism in with it as well. The result is actually called Shlubb And Klump English.
- In The DCU, this is a trademark of "Big Words", a member of the Newsboy Legion.
- And his Marvel counterpart, Jefferson Worthington Sandervilt of the Young Allies.
- Brainiac Five, from Legion of Superheroes is another excellent example. Some of the incarnations of him are actually consistently annoyed that he has to "dumb it down" for his fellow Legionnaires.
- As the example on the Quotes page demonstrates, Mr. Fantastic of the Fantastic Four tends to talk this way (as does Giant Man of The Avengers on occasion, though more often than not he's just crazy). Reed's loquaciousness usually results in ribbing from the Thing and the Human Torch (and, if they're in the room, the Invisible Woman or other heroes like Spider-Man).
- It's a bit of a running gag that Reed is all too often explaining what a certain plot-relevant piece of machinery does rather than actually putting it to use, which causes The Thing endless annoyance, since he's the one doing the heavy lifting when they could be done by now.
- Memorably lampshaded in Ultimate Marvel. Reed and Ben are fighting a bunch of superadvanced aliens from another dimension (it's a long story) and they get a hold of one of the aliens' weapons.
Ben: Reed, what is that thing? Reed: [Insert overcomplicated explanation with lots of big words] Ben: Reed, what is that thing? Reed: It shoots hot stuff.
- Doctor Henry McCoy (a.k.a. Beast of the X-Men) does this all the time. In most incarnations, it's for the joy of wordplay — everyone he works with already knows he's a genius — though it undoubtedly has a side effect of convincing people he's never met before that even mutants who look like him can possess an enormous vocabulary.
- Both Calvin and Hobbes from Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes are known for having particularly verbose discussions with each other. This is occasionally mentioned, such as in the Tenth Anniversary Collection, in contrast with his usual failing grades at school.
- Calvin has quite the vocabulary for a kid his age.
- He must obey the inscrutable exhortations of his soul.
- Perhaps he is just your standard under-achiever with a wickely wild imagination that is far more interesting than anything that a teacher will ever say.
- Not an Aspie: no special interests, always gets sarcasm, listens to Hobbes, and his conversations have multiple topics. I'd say the kid has ADHD if he must be diagnosed.
- The Caged Demonwolf from Empowered, with lots of Added Alliterative Appeal. ("Like unto 80s action-cinema icon Michael Dudikoff, be you a fabled Ninja American, oh jingoistic jackanapes?")
- His Imagine Spots are readily identified because it carries over to everyone's dialogue (even mid-ravishing).
- Mammoth Mogul of the Sonic the Hedgehog comic is known for this, to the point that when told Mogul wants to talk with him, Sonic prays that he has a sore throat as he's got other things to do that day.
- One of the Kingpin's lieutenants speaks like this in Daredevil: Born Again.
- In Major Bummer, one of the people effected by EE Ms develops an extremely advanced brain (so advanced that his head balloons to gigantic size to hold it), but this has the side effect of making his already vast command of the English language utterly incomprehensible to all but the most astute of listeners, and even then only those armed with a dictionary.
- Cerebus features a character known only as "The Judge", who may just be the walking incarnation of this trope. A seemingly omnipotent being, the judge never actually does anything with his limitless powers and knowledge because he is too busy making long, long, LONG expository speeches using very big words. How long? In his first appearance, he speaks uninterrupted for five. straight. issues.
- Though to be fair, he IS telling the history of the creation and eventual destruction of the world. These things take time.
- In a later issue, The Judge appears out of thin air to inform Death that he is about to die. And also that he is actually not Death at all, just delusional. It takes him more words to tell him this than the entire wordcount of the previous two issues combined.
- Leading to a crowning moment of funny when "Death's" only response to this verbal tsunami is to say "Well, fuck me," and die.
Material created by enthusiasts of particular media
- Dennis in The Luck Of Dennis St Michel Viscount Stokington does this a lot, even when decrying the same habit in his nemesis.
"The ragged figure looming in the dusky storm-light bore little resemblance to the pompous young naïf who delighted in using a type or kind of sesquipedalian loquaciousness to mock his foes. In truth, I had found his book-learning pretentious; I know a pretty word or two, but do not feel the need to flaunt them at every interval."
- Gohan in Dragonball Abridged has had two occasions of this so far. It's a good indicator that you've really pissed him off.
- In one of Katieforsythe's Sherlock Holmes fanfictions Watson actually uses the word sesquipedalian to describe Holmes.
Animated feature-length theatrical releases
- Mr. Ray from Finding Nemo: "Optical orbits up front. And remember, we keep our subesophageal ganglion to ourselves. That means you, Jimmy."
- Wordy villain Cat R. Waul in An American Tail: Fievel Goes West is often wont to spit out long lines of English loquaciousness, and is often forced to describe his intent in simpler terms. He's voiced by John Cleese. Coincidence?... No.
- Mr. Longface Caterpillar from the 2009 Strawberry Shortcake movie peppers his speech with overly fancy words, which are translated by Blueberry Muffin. This is subverted at one point when he mentions fool's gold, and Blueberry "translates" this to its official name, iron pyrite.
Non-animated feature-length theatrical releases
- Waldo of Our Gang (a.k.a. The Little Rascals).
- A Running Gag in Pirates of the Caribbean.
Jack Sparrow: I think we've all arrived at a very special place. Spiritually, ecumenically, grammatically.
- Not to mention "I'm disinclined to acquiesce to your request... means 'No'."
- The Architect in The Matrix.
- Parodied so brilliantly by Wil Ferrell in this video from the MTV Movie Awards.
- One of the trademarks of Groucho Marx was fast deadpan Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness.
- Johann Krauss from Hellboy II: The Golden Army.
Krauss: Shoot it in ze central ganglion!
Hellboy: What?
Krauss: Ze central ganglion... Shoot it in ze head!
- Ulysses Everett McGill speaks almost entirely like this in O Brother Where Art Thou?, as does villain "Big Dan" Teague.
- At least in McGill's case, it's inverted in that the story makes it patently obvious that Everett is using the big words because he's trying to sound smarter, and because he does think he's smarter than his two less-inclined companions.
- V of V for Vendetta introduces himself like this, complete with oodles of alliteration. He calms down eventually, but still speaks very intelligently. It's pretty epic, and implies that somebody pillaged a thesaurus a few times, specifically, the sections of a thesaurus between the letters "U" and "W".
V: Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin van-guarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V. Evey Hammond:' ... Are you like a crazy person?
- In The Last Boy Scout, the two heroes are getting pummelled by an unusually verbose Mook's large companion, leading Bruce Willis's character to exclaim, "Shit, we're being beat up by the inventor of Scrabble!"
- Can't forget I Robot. Dr. Calvin is very much like this in the beginning, though she sort of thaws out.
Detective Del Spooner: So, Dr. Calvin, what exactly do you do around here?
Susan Calvin: My general fields are advanced robotics and psychiatry. Although, I specialize in hardware-to-wetware interfaces in an effort to advance U.S.R.'s robotic ahthropomorphization program.
Detective Del Spooner: So, what exactly do you do around here?
Susan Calvin: I make the robots seem more human.
Detective Del Spooner: Now wasn't that easier to say?
Susan Calvin: Not really. No.
Print and written media
- Meta-fictional example: In A Series of Unfortunate Events, Georgina's books are only written in this type of prose. Actually one of the characters think it's less difficult to say "hum" when an unusual word shows up rather than looking it up, with surprisingly good results. Made even weirder by the fact Georgina always speaks in a normal manner.
- In the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, the nerdy magician Telemain always talks like this, with Morwen usually having to translate for him. However, when he is glared at hungrily by Kazul, a sentient dragon, he manages to speak normally, albeit very very slowly.
- More like Magi Babble — Morwen states that he's perfectly understandable as long as he isn't talking about magic, and there are plenty of supporting examples. He just insists on precision on that topic, while most magic-users (who are all using slightly different systems anyway) are fine with colloquialisms.
- The infamous The Eye of Argon uses absurdly obscure words whenever possible, sometimes whimsicorically making them up outright.
- It also uses even normal words incorrectly (grammatically AND semantically), when it manages to even spell them right. "Many-fauceted scarlet emerald" is a particularly... colorful... example. The extremely-thinly-veiled discussion of the hero's current hit points also comes to mind.
- This was the major character trait of William Harper "Johnny" Littlejohn in the Doc Savage novels.
- Discworld: Ponder Stibbons often does this while trying to explain the underlying principles of magic to the other Wizards at Unseen University (at least the ones who don't work in the High Energy Magic building).
- Mr Plum, the slimy teacher from The Rotter's Club. Heck, you need an encyclopaedia to work out what he's saying.
- In Rudyard Kipling's The Elephant's Child (or at least, the audio version read by Jack Nicholson and music by Bobby McFerrin), the bi-coloured python rock snake always talks like this, for that is how bi-coloured python rock snakes always talk, O Best Beloved.
- He talks that way in the book, too.
Bi-coloured Python Rock Snake: Rash and inexperienced traveller, we will now seriously devote ourselves to a little high tension, because if we do not, it is my impression that yonder self-propelling man-of-war with the armour-plated upper deck (and by this, O Best Beloved, he meant the Crocodile) will permanently vitiate your future career.
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay sometimes lapsed into this.
- Christopher Paolini apparently feels the need to use a thesaurus at all times with the Inheritance Trilogy.
- In Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, Mr. Croup seems practically incapable of pronouncing any bon mot of less than polysyllabic length, much to the confusion of Mr. Vandemar. At one point he describes himself and Mr. Vandemar as having "funny clothes and convoluted circumlocutions", to which Mr Vandemar responds indignantly "I haven't got a circumlo..." Mr. Croup explains that the word means "a way of speaking around something. A digression. Verbosity."
- In the Young Wizards series, the wizardry manuals are given to insanely complicated language; it's mind-boggling how an eleven-year-old girl can even hope to understand it. "Temporospatial claudication" indeed!
- Not unjustified, as these are English translations from a language which was designed from the ground up to describe the (actual, speculative, and alternative) workings of The Multiverse... or more accurately, reality reflects the language. In the first book, said girl spends around a week of study trying to understand the Speech well enough to even cast a simple spell. I'd imagine a year or two spent seriously studying what's basically a truly comprehensive and utterly accurate multidisciplinary textbook whose contents constantly reorganize to be exactly what its owner is currently most suited to learn... could produce mind-boggling results, indeed.
- Anything written by China Mieville, although King Rat was much less verbose than the Bas Lag novels.
- From At the Mountains of Madness by HP Lovecraft.
"The leathery, undeteriorative, and almost indestructible quality was an inherent attribute of the thing's form of organization, and pertained to some paleogean cycle of invertebrate evolution utterly beyond our powers of speculation."
- Other novels by Lovecraft may count too.
- At least this one had the excuse that it was supposed to be the recollection of a scientist printed in an attempt to prevent further exploration of Antarctica — many scientists in real life tend to go for complicated expression even when they wouldn't need to, in subconscious belief that it'll give a more intelligent impression. Universities often try to discourage this, but with limited success.
- Doctor Grordbort's Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory is a stimulating compendium of destructive devices for all enthusiasts of the genre known as "steam-punk", plus those gentlemen of leisure who feel that their masculinity would be grossly enhanced by the acquisition of an Exterminator of Prodigious Dimensions.
- Marmaduke Scarlet from The Little White Horse speaks like this. He's a guy who works in a kitchen.
- Pretty much anything written by Stephen Donaldson tends to veer into this trope at times; particularly the Thomas Covenant books, where he also has a tendency to utilize archaic or obscure definitions for many commonly used terms.
- Thankfully, no one in the Twilight series speaks like this, despite the Purple Prose narration.
- This instance of avoidance would most certainly be the direct result of a rare intelligent conclusion on the author's part that any attempt at sesquipedalian loquaciousness would precipitate an insurmountable hindrance in the form of her relative inability to properly use the language of which she is purportedly a literary master...
- Redwall's hares and more Wicked Cultured villains occasionally drop into this. "So what happens when the bally precipitation ceases?" (blank stares) "Sorry, I mean what happens when the rain stops?" And another time:
"What does he mean by 'arboreal verdance'?"
"Hmm, I rather think it means treetops, leafy green ones."
"Oh! So why doesn't he say treetops?"
"Why should he when he knows how to say words like arboreal verdance?"
- In one of Anthony Burgess's short stories, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson are discussing the new King James version of the Bible. Jonson mentions that the initial choice for translator thought Genesis should begin with "In the initiality of the mundane entity the Omnicompetent fabricated the celestial and terrene quiddities."
- George Orwell once took this one passage from the Bible:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
- And rewrote it like this...
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
- The entire thing can also be translated to mean "Success is random."
- This trait is quite common among Jack Vance characters, generally as a sugar-coating on their jerkass behavior. Note that V, the page image is a character from a webcomic inspired by Dungeons And Dragons, a series which itself was inspired by Vance's writings.
Non-animated episodic series produced for television networks
- Speech like this is the key joke in many Monty Pythons Flying Circus sketches. John Cleese is known to use this in other roles he has held since.
"Frankly, I'm against people who give vent to their loquacity by extraneous bombastic circumlocution."
- In the "Cheese Shop" sketch, the customer alternates between Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness and slangy Cockney speech.
- And speaking of John Cleese, in the Fawlty Towers episode, The Hotel Inspectors, he finds himself having to contend with a guest whose use of flowery, overcomplicated language renders him nearly incomprehensible.
- In "Communication Problems", Polly gets rid of the pushy, selectively deaf Mrs. Richards by asking Manuel to "lend her your assistance in connection with her reservation", knowing that Manuel won't understand.
- The Sixth Doctor in Doctor Who took this to ridiculous lengths — and in Pip & Jane Baker scripts, most other characters would start talking like this as well.
The Doctor: Fortuitous would be a more apposite epithet!
Peri: Or, as we humans say, "Lucky would be a better word."
- River Tam from Firefly occasionally slipped into this, with a mix of Infallible Babble and a banquet's worth of Word Salad.
- Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes Minister / Yes Prime Minister speaks in an overly long and complex fashion in order to flummox his political masters and thus maintain the Civil Service status quo — however, he's so used to speaking in such a fashion that he's incapable of speaking clearly even when he genuinely wants to make himself clearly understood.
- Not so much incapable as very, very reluctant. A short answer could generally be dragged out of him and usually formed the punchline to a joke. For instance, here's how Humphrey confesses his sins:
Sir Humphrey Appleby: The identity of the official whose alleged responsibility for this hypothetical oversight has been the subject of recent discussion is not shrouded in quite such impenetrable obscurity as certain previous disclosures may have led you to assume, but, not to put too fine a point on it, the individual in question is, it may surprise you to learn, one whom your present interlocutor is in the habit of defining by means of the perpendicular pronoun.
James Hacker: I beg your pardon?
Sir Humphrey Appleby: It was... I.
- In the Hacker Diaries, the fictional diaries of Jim Hacker and novelisation of the Yes Minister series, it is stated that he lived out the last of his days in a home for the elderly deranged when "advancing years, without in any way impairing his verbal fluency, disengaged the operation of his mind from the content of his speech."
- In How I Met Your Mother, the group have a conversation about Robin's new Argentinian boyfriend who can't speak English that well. When he arrives at the bar, they continue the conversation, but with longer words so he doesn't understand (he doesn't: he thinks they're talking about baseball). Funny, because their responses weren't all that different from before:
Barney: Come on Ted, back me up here.
Ted:I'm just happy Robin's happy.
[becomes]
Barney: Support my hypothesis, Ted.
Ted: I'm just jubilant my former paramour's jubilant.
- Billy on the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers spoke like this; every time he said anything, everyone looked expectantly at Trini until she translated. However, when the situation became truly dire, he sometimes lapsed into regular speech; whether this meant he used big words to show off intelligence or the show had bad writers was never explained. This tended to get phased out as the seasons went on, as if his hanging out with the other teens helped him pick up their speech habits (or possibly because Trini had left). Ironically, most people watching the show on TV could understand him fine, or at least guess the intent of his statements by context. It's only in-universe that anybody that's
not Trini not equally as intelligent as him is left utterly confused.
- Data from Star Trek The Next Generation occasionally did this, particularly when attempting humor or referring to an idiomatic expression. For Example: "I appear to have been pursuing an untamed ornithoid without cause" (wild goose chase).
- Lampshaded in Friends when Joey uses a thesaurus on every single word of a letter he's writing in an attempt to sound intelligent.
Monica: All right, what was this sentence, originally?
Joey: Oh. "They're warm, nice people with big hearts."
Chandler: And that became, "They're humid, pre-possessing homosapiens with full-sized aortic pumps?"
- In the episode "Ink and Incapability" of Blackadder the Third, Dr. Samuel Johnson, author of the first English dictionary, speaks just like that ("I celebrated last night the encyclopedic implementation of my pre-meditated orchestration of demotic Anglo-Saxon."). Blackadder resorted to using made-up long words to freak Johnson out in retaliation ("Oh, I'm sorry, sir. I'm anaspeptic, frasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulation.").
- This is all beginning to sound like Dago talk to me.
- The "genius" types on Bones, including the character nicknamed "Bones", do this often. Justified, in that those who do so outside of the professional circumstances in which it's expected show other signs of Asperger's as well, particularly Dr. Zack Addy.
- Brennan once agreed with someone by saying, "I concur. Vehemently!"
- Major Dr. Samantha Carter and, to a lesser degree, Dr. Daniel Jackson were often guilty of this on Stargate SG-1.
- Gibbs gets annoyed just about every single time it happens on NCIS. Ducky justified one instance by saying he likes the word "exsanguinate".
- It is a great word.
- The only thing better than exsanguination is exsanguination caused by defenestration.
- Of course, being exsanguinated by defenestration requires evisceration by the fragmentation of the glass.
- Used frequently on A Bit of Fry and Laurie. This sketch is a good example, as its use of gratuitous linguistics turns what would otherwise have been an unremarkable barber shop sketch into several minutes of hysterical laughter (Your Mileage May Vary).
- Lampshaded in The West Wing by the President, who says:
"In my house, anyone who uses one word when they could have used ten just isn't trying hard."
- Spinelli on General Hospital, though this seems to be because he's a Rain Man.
- Judge Joe Brown often uses this trope, apparently in an attempt to try to add some class to his "folksy" image (and possibly to intimidate the clueless people who come on his show), but instead he usually ends up coming across as pompous.
- Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory talks like this all the time.
- Any of the four main geeks do this often, mostly between themselves or colleagues when discussing theories or projects, but are quick to drop it around Penny as to include her... well, except for Sheldon, but he expects people to accomodate him in any situation, and will complain about having to do so for others.
- And it could be considered subverted any time Penny, or a normal person, speak in modern slang or pop speak around Sheldon, as he rarely knows what that means and needs a science or math equivalence to understand.
- Russell Brand would also use this trope frequently. Made all the more visible by that he'd only really be doing it to make a Nob Gag. On a show about Big Brother.
Lyrical and instrumental arranged works
- In the Fats Waller song "Your Feet are Too Big", Waller liberally uses long, erudite words during the song, such as "Your pedal extremities really are obnoxious."
- Isaac Hayes' "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic" ("My gastronomical stupensity is really satisfied when you're loving me...")
- Michael Nesmith's post-Monkees solo work is notorious for this, though his most verbose song, "Wax Minute" ("minute" as in small) was actually written by someone else.
- Bad Religion, a punk band, seem to be quite fond of this. Here is just one example out of many. There is also a fan-made lexicon, for use in all of your pedantic endeavors into abstruse grandiloquence.
- Eminem to some degree has this as well, as his style is actually very eloquent and verbose at times, despite whatever the topic may be.
- Tom Lehrer's song "Lobachevsky" refers to the title character's first original paper, which had the easy-to-remember title of Analytical Algebraic Topology of a Locally Euclidean Metricization of an Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifold. Most listeners would assume Lehrer was playing this trope straight — but anyone familiar with the historical Lobachevsky and his work in geometry would realize that this was actually a perfectly reasonable title for a paper in his field of math.
Computational, mobile, and other post-television media
- A common game in the Image Boards is the "Verbose Thread": everybody must speak with the most convoluted sesquipedalianisms possible, and that includes the Image Macros. "I think halo is a pretty cool guy, he kills aliens and doesn't afraid of anything", for example, becomes "I hold a personal ideology whose central belief is that Master Chief from the Halo videogames is a quite remarkable and interesting man, because he terminates extraterrestrials and does not cower in the face of insurmountable odds." This has led, for example, to "NO U" becoming "I would like to elucidate the fact that the aforementioned statements about me apply more accurately to their own author."
- Fascinating anecdote, fraternal sibling.
- The title of this blog post by PZ Myers.
Sports entertainment programming
- Promos are a good way for a wrestler to build his/her character, explain their motivations, etc. Some will occasionally slip into this. And then you have John Morrison, who always talks like this, seemingly rambling on and segueing from topic to topic without any real connection to the original topic whatsoever. Which is made to be even more ridiculous when compared to his (former) tag team partner, "The Miz", who speaks in a very basic fashion (who uses the Marine rallying cry "OOO-RAH!" as a period).
- The Ultimate Warrior was also famous for this, interspersing feral snarling, grunting, and shouting with long, rambling promos peppered with million-dollar words used almost-correctly. In his later years, he even started throwing in words he made up out of whole cloth, apparently believing his character motivations to be too complex to explain in the English language as it stands. Case in point...
- Bob Backlund's mid-'90s comeback was characterized by his speaking with words from the unabridged dictionary; notably, calling the fans "plebians".
- In late 2009, it is Chris Jericho who is noted for using an SAT vocabulary, usually as an insult towards the
fans WWE Universe, calling them gelatinous tapeworms, germ incubators, hypocrites, pharisees, among other not so nice things.
- Brian Pillman used to engage in a bit of this. For example, un the promo where Chris Benoit was drafted into the Horsemen, Pillman ranted about how Sting "regaled [his] obsequious lapdogs with [his] reprehensible act."
Transistor soundbox media
- Eugene on Adventures in Odyssey speaks this way to the point of hilarity or exasperation, depending on who he's speaking to.
- Katrina has a vocabulary to match Eugene's, but is careful to limit her verbosity to when they are speaking to each other.
- W.C. Fields made this into a career.
- The Bob & Ray character Dr. Eugene Stapley, the 'Word Wizard', is a broad parody of this trope... at times possibly just a bit broader than intended. After Bob suggests 'plunging straight into the mail': "Male and female serve only to differentialize one type of living creature from another. Now, undoubtedly some male members of the animal kingdom would be softer, say, to plunge into than others; but in any coincidence, the act of literally plunging into the male would in all probabilitiness be injureful!"
Non-electronic gaming media
- Bad roleplaying character descriptions can invoke this trope as the result of their players evidently consulting a thesaurus every few words in an attempt to sound eloquent or pad out their description to hundreds of words. This is just one example.
Stage-acted media
- Hamlet spoofs it with the character Osric, who desperately tries to look intelligent by talking this way. Hamlet mocks him by going even farther over the top with it. As you might imagine, a Shakespeare speech that's deliberately written to be obtuse and impenetrable is quite something to witness.
- The Mikado: Pooh-Bah "can trace [his] ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule."
- Ralph Rackstraw in HMS Pinafore speaks with exceedingly purple prose for a "humble sailor".
- Parodied to the extreme with Lucky's three page monologue in Waiting for Godot. Read through it carefully and there is actually a philosophical point being made, but it is embroidered with so much verbal diaorreah, non-sequitors and just sheer nonsense words that it sounds like a complete load of gibberish.
- In one version of the Three Little Pigs, the judge's page speaks this to a ridiculous extent.
Electronic gaming media
- The Engineer in Team Fortress 2 frequently switches between this (when he's explaining his constructs or means of defending himself) and a comparatively more simple way of speaking.
"Hey look buddy, I'm an engineer, that means I solve problems. Not problems like 'What is beauty?' because that would fall within the purview of your conundrums of philosophy. I solve practical problems. Fer instance: How am I gonna stop some big, mean mother-hubbard from tearing me a structurally superfluous new behind? The answer? Use a gun. And if that don't work? Use more gun."
- Upon closer examination, the way he emphasizes his words during the "interview", especially the mocking tone in which he spits out the word "philosophy", would suggest a sort of enlightened anti-intellectualism, making his loquaciousness a parody of this trope and his ordinary, clipped manner of speech an inversion.
- Alternate Character Interpretation: he doesn't sound mocking at all, suggesting more that he views philosophy as being merely a separate field of problems to the ones that he solves.
- One character encountered early in Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal speaks like this, and uses it as evidence that he is more intelligent than everyone around him. If your own character has a high enough Intelligence score, you can insinuate (in a similarly roundabout, verbose way) that you think he does so to make up for a rather private "deficiency” on his part, If You Know What I Mean.
- Taken to ridiculous extremes in the fan-made Phylomortis RPG Maker games where every single character spoke in nothing but big words... including children no older than six years old. Even the in-game tutorials abused this. That, coupled with their Nintendo Hardness made the series inaccessible to all but the most dedicated gamers. The sole gimmick of the game was its ridiculous standard of vocabulary, however, so it's safe to say that its target audience (however small) was indeed captured.
- Not just the characters. Most of the menu commands and system dialogue, too. Most games would be content with ending a battle with "Victory!" or "You won the battle!" Phylomortis capped it off with "You mercilessly slew the obnoxious foe..."
- Sam of Sam & Max, a six-foot canine shamus, tends to express himself in this general manner. Said manner tends to annoy his partner. Perhaps his most elegant wordsmithing takes place in this promo. Sam occasionally demonstrates that he is Sophisticated As Hell.
"An episodic sociopathic lagomorph. The mind boggles."
- Valve's Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator (Gravity Gun) from Half-Life 2, and Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device (Portal Gun) from Portal, as well as many of the utterances of the Genetic Life Form and Disc Operating System from the latter title. The latter partially comes from the Aperture Science folk wanting to stick their name in front of everything (Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grill, Aperture Science High-Energy Pellet, Aperture Science Vital Apparatus Vent, etc).
- How could you not mention the Fifteen Hundred Megawatt Aperture Science Heavy Duty Supercolliding Super Button?
- Dr. Kleiner is likewise rather prone to communicating in this manner, especially when the nature of his audience makes it inappropriate.
Dr. Kliener: For those so inclined, now would be an excellent time for procreation! Which is to say, in layman's terms, you should seriously consider doing your part for the revival of the species.
- Luke Atmey from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney — Trials and Tribulations combines this with a flair for descriptions that are over-dramatic to the point of obtuseness. Phoenix can usually only manage a rough translation, usually for the benefit of Maya, who is more often totally lost.
- Don't forget Redd White's fantabulous vocabulosity!
- And Valant Gramarye, who combines this with alliteration. Apollo even notes that "his overly loquacious manner can get annoying".
- Wesley Stickler and his penchant for using twenty words to say what that can be said in five deserves a mention too.
- Lord Rugdumph gro-Shurgak in The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion is a victim of this as well, although he never gets it right:
- Dmitri Petrovich and Stephanie Morgan from Backyard Sports definitely fit this trope.
- Volteer from The Legend of Spyro talks like this, often to the annoyance of the other Dragon Guardians and Sparx, though Spyro somehow has no problem understanding him. Example:
Volteer: It's hard to be absolutely sure, Ignitus, but it seems she was using me as some sort of suspended, organic power source.
Sparx: Huh?
Spyro: She was using him as a battery.
Sparx: Why didn't he just say so?
- Bentley from the original series did this. Or at least, the one from Spyro 3 did.
- Luxord from Kingdom Hearts makes his entrance declaring the Heartless boss he summons a "veritable maelstrom of avarice".
- In Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, he combines this trope with alliteration and a hefty amount of gambling-related puns.
- Due to her immensely dry dialogue, Shelke from Final Fantasy 7: Dirge of Cerberus has been classified as this by fanon.
Internet-originated sequential graphic media
Internet-originated non-sequential graphic media
- In the Whateley Universe, Phase does this regularly, just because of the way she was raised. In one Phase novel, she thought of her morning routine as her "matutinal ministrations". She didn't say it out loud to impress anyone, she just thinks that way. Also, many of the devisers and gadgeteers drop into this as soon as they start talking about their inventions or research.
- George. Just... George. This is actually lampshaded and spoofed more than once, as the other characters are prone to making fun of George for his long-winded speeches. Two other characters in the series, Jake and G.R., are also known to edge into this territory, but with them it’s much more occasional and controlled.
- Lear Dunham from Broken Saints is guilty of this at times, especially in the Grand Finale.
- Ezekiel from BitF City. His friend Bola "Translates".
Non-Japanese originated animated media
- Evil Genius Plankton has a habit of speaking this way in SpongeBob SquarePants. His speaking this way in trying to recruit mooks in a Bad Guy Bar doesn't end well for him.
Plankton: Felicitations, malefactors! I am endeavoring to misappropriate the formulary for the preparation of affordable comestibles!
- Dexter on Dexter's Laboratory is fond of doing this. Notable examples include making a to-do list that included the chore "Aquatic Nutrifacation" instead of "Feed Fish". He also refers to the wheels on a car as "High Output Torquifiers".
- Unique in that this is how a young boy would actually do something like this, as "nutrification" and "torquifiers" are not actually words, just suffixes hastily slapped on thesaurus-poop.
- Fellow pre-Teen Genius Jimmy Neutron in The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron is also fond of the trope.
- Wind Whistler on My Little Pony. "This meteorological debabacle is quite anomalous." Peach Blossom too: "I will reconnoiter post-haste and ascertain what has transpired!"
- Edd in Ed Edd N Eddy, often to the annoyance of his less-educated peers.
- As Brainstorm (a "sea food platter with a rather high IQ", as he puts it), Ben is prone to using extremely large words. With a British accent. His previous "smart form", Greymatter, tended to use words of a more normal size unless referring to scientific principles.
- One episode of The Simpsons has Homer start talking like this after a Sleep Learning tape intended to curb his hunger is switched with a vocabulary builder. "Lamentably, no. My gastronomic rapacity knows no satiety."
- Some of the more intellectually inclined Springfield residents (Sideshow Bob, Professor Frink) occasionally indulge in this. And then there's Mr. Burns and his Antiquated Linguistics.
- One episode of WordGirl involves a villain using Applied Phlebotinum to cause random people to use large words in order to sell dictionaries.
- Doctor Octopus in The Spectacular Spider-Man, especially post-Freak Out. "I cannot believe I once lived in this anemic hovel."
- Perceptor, of Transformers. It's particularly bad when your fellow robots, all of whom would likely have the whole of a given language in their databanks, ask you to say something "in [language], please". It probably doesn't help that he has a habit of going into details WHILE using complex words, to the point where Optimus tires of it in seconds.
- The writers for Looney Tunes sometimes had a fondness for big words. Mid-1940s, Daffy was quite fond of this. He once asked a crying dog, "Why the copious flow of lachrymal fluid, my garrulous canine?"
- In the 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series more than any other incarnation, Donatello is guilty of this. He frequently geeks out about future technology or the chemical properties of things he runs across, and Techno Babble ensues. One of the others (usually Michelangelo, but occasionally Raphael) acknowledges this, and usually asks him to repeat himself in English this time. Though sometimes the writers sacrifice snappier dialogue to remind us that he's the smart one:
Donatello: If we take the south conduit, it'll intersect with the old drainage tunnel!
- In The Powerpuff Girls episode "Mo'Linguish", Mojo Jojo teaches the whole town to speak like he does. The simple, straightforward word is intentionally neglected in favor of over-eloquence. Example from the Mayor, calling about a bank robbery:
The Mayor: There is a stealing of sorts happening at the place where money is given and taken, that is to say deposited and withdrawn — and sometimes redistributed and loaned. But currently the taker is taking that which is not his, thus performing an act of illegality, which could result in incarceration within the confines of a penal facility, that is to say prison, jail, hoosegow, et cetera.
- In Phineas and Ferb, Fireside Girl Gretchen (the one who wears glasses) actually says the first word of this trope's title. Because she said it, she earns her "Saying a Word No One Else in the Room Knows" accomplishment patch.
- Spoofed in the South Park episode "Woodland Critter Christmas", where Mousey the Mouse is a parody of the stock "Smart" character in cartoons, complete with comically large glasses and a slavish adherence to this trope.
- Same thing goes for Brain on Arthur. In fact, it's shown that his parents keep a large dictionary at the dinner table because of it.
- Dr. Emmett Lathrop Brown, a.k.a. The Doc, as portrayed in the Back to the Future animated series, is the king of this. The movie version, while prone to Techno Babble, isn't nearly as bad. Jules is also a master at it.
- Good old Professor Farnsworth can have this affect when he actually is making sense
Farnsworth: There. That space-time eversion has given us their box and vice-versa!
Leela: So what you think you just explained to us is that -
Farnsworth: Correct! This box contains our own universe!
Nonfictional depictions of the current trope
- Nikola Tesla invented the plasma lamp (those things that were cool in the 80s), but he called it an Inert Gas Discharge Tube.
- Certain sciences have extensive "in" jargon and vocabulary that have no synonym that can be properly explained in simple terms. Worse, some terms mean completely different things when used accurately than when used by laymen. As a result sesquipedialian loquaciousness can sometimes be the only way of saying something because saying it "in simple English" makes it considerably less true.
- To start with, remember that in the sciences "theory" means "well-tested hypothesis that is tentatively accepted as accurate" (for example gravity has worked the same way every time it's been tested, thus it's behavior is a scientific theory). In common parlance it just means "guess".
- When Penzias and Wilson were working with a microwave receiver in the mid-1960's, they kept getting some background hiss which they couldn't get rid of. While documenting their work they found that the horn of the antenna was covered by "white dielectric material", which had been "deposited" by the grey avian residents of the horn (i.e. pigeon shit).
- This seems to be a characteristic of ancient Mesopotamian religious poetry. Apparently, the scribes who wrote them consulted ancient dictionaries for the express purpose of using very obscure words and wildly obsolete grammar to Mind Screw their audience. So, a real life example — and Older Than Feudalism.
- Similarly, Norse Skalds had the habit of describing really simple objects by complex multi-component metaphors, filling their poetry with literary riddles that were deliberately hard to decipher.
- This is the passage for which Judith Butler won the 1998 Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing Contest: "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."
- Translation: "As political theorists started thinking of institutions as things made by states, rather than components of states, they had to start thinking about how time and progress affects politics, rather than assuming that all institutions of the same type work more or less the same across time periods."
- Medical doctors are accused of using long Greek or Latin words to describe symptoms or illnesses that have simple common names. Some of it is unnecessary, but it also helps to make it absolutely clear exactly what they mean, you wouldn't want a mistake made because something wasn't exact.
- Dave Barry mentioned this in one column, when he went to the doctor because his tongue was swollen. The doc called it something in Latin which Dave claims to have later looked up that meant "swollen tongue".
- The best: "idiopathic". Which means "we don't know why it's doing that stuff".
- Computing is one area that has so much jargon (both technical and slang) that when you've had extensive exposure to the field, such as taking a Computer Science degree at university, or have just simply been mucking around with computers for years, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to explain something to someone with less knowledge of the subject than you.
- The MP 3 page at How Video Game Specs Work is a great example of this. See the page history for an apology from the entry's author saying why it's so difficult to explain the inner workings of an audio codec without lapsing into Technobabble. To drive the point home, the MP3 codec involves discrete digital signals, pulse-code modulation, sampling frequency, discrete Fourier transform, frequency domain, filtering, convolution, Huffmann coding, information entropy, psychoacoustic modeling, bit rate, quantization, and media streaming.
- Sufficiently large technical communities can develop their own specialized vocabulary on top of normal technical terms, such that an entire sentence can be incomprehensible to expert outside programmers, and doubly incomprehensible to non-programmers.
- Everything becomes funny if you describe it with Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, as Dr. Henry Gibbons has shown us: "A kiss is the anatomical juxtaposition of two orbicular muscles in a state of contraction."
- Also known as "osculation".
- Scientific American got in on the game as well: "the localized knowledge and know-how developed with untutored experience in particular everyday settings and activities—the so-called school of hard knocks"
- U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden is well known for this. During the 2008 Democratic primary, when asked at a debate whether he could be disciplined enough as president to restrain his tendency to run on at the mouth: "Yes."
- Biden is notorious for having plagiarized the British politician Neil Kinnock, who is also famed for his loquaciousness.
- Composer Igor Stravinsky lapsed into this sometimes; an example taken at random from his book Poetics of Music: "The true hierarchy of phenomena, as well as the true hierarchy of relationships, takes on substance and form on a plane entirely apart from that of conventional classifications. Let me entertain the hope that the clarification of this thesis will be one of the results of my course, a result I greatly desire."
- The Postmodernist Generator lets you generate random texts using complex but utterly meaningless vocabulary.
- Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the effects of tetrodotoxin, the poison found in pufferfish:
"Paresthesias * "pins and needles" type sensation; this is about the most justifiable of the lot, given the awkwardness of using the more common description of the lips and tongue are followed by sialorrhea * drooling , sweating, headache, weakness, lethargy, ataxia * incoordination , incoordination * Yes, they used this one twice. See what happens when you use words nobody without a medical degree understands? , tremor, paralysis, cyanosis * bluish skin , aphonia * inability to speak , dysphagia * difficulty swallowing , seizures, dyspnea * shortness of breath , bronchorrhea * excessive phlegm , bronchospasm * sudden constriction of the airways , respiratory failure, coma, and hypotension * low blood pressure ."
- This is pretty typical for articles dealing with the symptoms of various toxins. At least they're (usually) courteous enough to pothole the more arcane words so you can just click them and say to yourself "oh, is that all that means?"
- The winner of the 2006 Ig Nobel prize in Literature was Daniel M. Oppenheimer of Princeton University for his report "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly"
- Baseball Hall of Famer "Orator Jim" O'Rourke.
- Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, was an extremely well-educated man who was incessantly guilty of this trope. Some of his speeches which survive to this day contain sentences more than a hundred words in length.
- Current Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd sometimes tets criticised/mocked for not being able to say things simply. One famous example is him saying that a formerly paraplegic man had "achieved ambulation" (i.e. was able to walk again)
- Most English Literature students come out of their degrees speaking this way. Particularly after they have been taught Literary Theory, the poor bastards.
- Ron Dennis, the former boss of the Mclaren Formula One team, made such exemplary use of this trope that it became known around the paddock as "Ronspeak". Asked why he chooses to speak like this, he replied, "Adherence to a homogenous lexicon axiomatically optimises messaging consistency. So it works".
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