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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 speech harder for some to understand.
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:
Anime
- 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 episode 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.
Comic Books
- 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 Legionof 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).
- 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?
- Doctor Henry McCoy (aka 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 intersting than anything that a teacher will ever say.
- Not an Aspie, no special interests, always gets sarcasm, listens to Hobbes, and his conevrsations 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.
Film
- Dr. Emmett Lathrop Brown, a.k.a. The Doc, from the "Back to the Future" trilogy, is the *king* of this. For example, instead of saying "dance" he says "rhythmic ceremonial ritual". It's a wonder he didn't bother to say "terpsichorean customary physiological procedure".
- Actually, the movie version, while prone to Techno Babble, isn't too bad. It's the Animated Series version of Doc who takes this to new levels. Jules is also a master at it.
- Waldo of Our Gang (aka 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'."
- That one's always bugged this troper. The actual meaning of that phrase is much closer to "I don't want to."
- Well, it's Barbossa. Much of the time, it's basically the same thing, in effect.
- The Architect in The Matrix.
- 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!
- Mr. Ray from Finding Nemo: "Optical orbits up front. And remember, we keep our subesophageal ganglion to ourselves. That means you, Jimmy."
- 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 raped a thesaurus a few times, specifically, the sections of a thesaurus between the letters "U" and "W".
"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. "
"... 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."
- In MontyPython's Cheese Shop sketch, the customer alternates between Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness and slangy Cockney speech.
Literature
- 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 Techno 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.
- There's a truly monumental example in Terry Pratchett's Only You Can Save Mankind. The alien Captain asks Johnny for a consignment of breakfast cereal, yoghurt and fast food using Spock Speak. Sample dialogue:
Captain: It appears this is what you eat.
Johnny: No I don't. What are "pressed wheat extractions treated with sucrose"?
- 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.
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. This troper recalls searching through the dictionary for words that didn't even exist just to get through the first few chapters.
- 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?"
Live Action TV
- Speech like this was 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."
- 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."
- 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.
- 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 eldely 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.
- The part of the conversation right before this, that is Robin explaining that she still likes Gael, includes the lines
Barney: Within a triad of solar periods, you'll recognize your dearth of compatibility with your paramour and conclude your association.
Robin: My journey was transformative and I reassert my commitment to both the aforementioned paramour and the philosophies he espouses.
- In reality, this isn't a very good plan, since longer words are more often cognates for close languages like English and Spanish.
- It's really only true for English, where the long words usually come from a Latin root and the short words from an Anglo-Saxon root. (This troper has observed native speakers of Spanish, Italian and such languages tend to end up using the long words in English and come across as more high-brow/ educated than they would in their own language.)
- In reality, it was a perfect plan, as Robin's Argentinian boyfriend was a moron.
- In reality is not a bad plan as this native spanish speaking troper with a rather extensive vocabulary in both languages was downright confused (and learned a new word!)
- Ted talks like this all the time, especially during the college flashbacks, because he is - in the other characters' own words - douchy like that. And his on-again/off-again high school/college girlfriend, Karen, talks like this all the time too.
- 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?"
: Thesauruses (thesauri?) don't deal in definitions, they deal in synonyms; words that are similar in meaning.
Music
- 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."
- 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.
- Flanders and Swann abused this trope horribly every time Swann gets to sing in a foreign language. In "In The Desert" it probably goes on too long but it's more than made up for by "Kokoraki" in which Flanders (audibly) grows more and more impatient with the length of the song and when it finally ends (Swann remonstrating that he was forced to omit eight verses) remarks that Swann "can sing the rest of it *Swann sets in for another few verses* SOME OTHER TIME *Swann ignores him and carries on*" (spoiler for the sake of the comedy. You really should listen to their original stage shows).
- 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.
Professional Wrestling
- 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.
Radio
- 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.
Tabletop RPG
- 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.
Theater
- 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."
- The Modern Major General does a bit of this too, though more on the loquacious side.
- 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.
Video Games
- 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.
- Edwin too, IS this trope.
Edwin: Marvelous work! You've obviously exceeded your lowborn heritage and surged to the vanguard of goonery!
Protagonist: ... uh, what?
- 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. Kleiner: 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?
- 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.
Web Comics
- Vaarsuvius from The Order Of The Stick, especially early on.
- In the prequel book On the Origin of PCs, Roy has a go at it himself to convince Vaarsuvius that he's not just a big, dumb fighter who wants to suborn the smart guy by hiring him.
- For obvious reasons Vaarsuvius is an exception to the usual Talking Is A Free Action rule.
- Marcus from 1/0 not only uses big words, he makes them up. In keeping with the rules of English, albeit words only eccentric bureaucrats (or Lewis Carroll) would ever use. E.g.: complexitization, endetailing, envivifating, manifestulates, etc.
- The Slice Of Life webcomic Typographical Acknowledgment uses this infrequently, most prominently in the title. It is more however a comment on teenagers' overuse of Purple Prose in any written work of theirs. Naturally, it is written by a teenager who overuses Purple Prose in any written work of his.
- Penny Arcade's Tycho, both the author and the in-comic persona, likes to do this, as does his niece Ann (AKA Annarchy).
- When Penny Arcade did the mini-series Automata, Carl Swangee at one point refers to talking about the weather as "the ambient barometric pressure".
- In The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob, the hyper-intelligent fuzzy monster Molly peppers her speech with big, obscure, or antiquarian words—but she is equally likely to use teenage slang or kindergarten kiddie-speak. Galatea makes observation of her sister's odd speech patterns here.
- Rocky, of Lackadaisy Cats, the majority of the time.
Rocky: (trying to avoid being shot) Avril, Avril! From one reasoned individual to another... uh, if speech is truly what separates us from the beasts... as the Greeks suggested... I remain optimistic we're not yet beyond a resolution... uh, through civil discourse?
Avril: ARRAAWRGH! (slams Rocky against a wall and throws him to the ground)
- This becomes even more noticeable when he's around Freckle, who rarely says more than a couple words at a time.
- Massey Reinstein in Schlock Mercenary uses this trope to intimidate Schlock in one strip. It works''.
- It does, but only after being simplified to a straight up insult so he could understand what he was just assaulted with.
Ebby: Well? How'd it go?
Schlock: *close to tears* Massey beat me up with big words
- The L33t D00d from Megatokyo has his nigh-impenetrable l337 5p33k translated as grandiose prose. ""j00 90++@ chO0$3 +3h r19h+ 94M3, 0r 5}{3 w1LL 0wnz0r j00", for example, becomes "You must be commited to the correct game; otherwise, defeat is inevitable".
- A more litteral translation though is: "You gotta choose the right game, or she will owns you."
- MSPaintAdventures Too many to count, but this page is probably the most egregious example.
- XKCD gives us an example of why the opposite can be just as much of a problem.
- In Bob And George there's an entire alternate universe consisting out of people who only talk like this. Sure they can dumb themselves down to communicate with the lessers, but when at one point there's a present, a future and a far future version of two characters there's only Sesquipadalian dialogue.
- Kin, the yuan-ti from Goblins lapses into this when she's stressed.
"Yuan-ti have a high intelligence when compared to humanoids and in my case, it causes me to fall victim to an exponentially redundant vocabulary when I become nervous."
- Natureof Natures Art has almost every important character talk this way, thanks in large part to the very nature of the web comic, though it's eased up in the latter portions of the latest story.
- Rose Lalonde from Homestuck. She wrote a game FAQ entirely using this and Purple Prose, just for one example.
- Suicide For Hire's characters all use long words, and a lot of 'em. The comic's banner has a caption reading "Yeah, it's got dialogue. If you don't like it, you are entitled to bite my ass."
Web Original
- 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.
- 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."
- 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.
Western Animation
- Like the page quote says, 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.
Felicitations malefactors! I am endeavoring to misappropriate the formulary for the preparation of affordable comestibles!
- Dexter on Dexters 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 on 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 Word Girl involved 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."
- 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.
- 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.
- Grimlock also did it when he got smart in the episode "Grimlock's New Brain".
- Highbrow was also guilty of this, in "The Rebirth".
Highbrow: "I suppose it's the only meritorious way out of a meretricious situation."
Hardhead: "Yeah, me too, like he said."
- Um...why do giant robots need that sort of hooker?
- They've been confirmed onscreen to have secondary sexual characteristics in at least one universe. Take that as you will, thank Primus we never find out much detail about Transformer reproduction or familiar relations. This is just another piece on the pile of clues.
- Oddly enough, Brainstorm, who was the actual Smart Guy of the team, spoke fairly commonly unless he actually needed the jargon.
- You don't wanna get Genius Ditz Bulkhead from Transformers Animated talking about space bridges. You'll miss Perceptor.
- Across all series, Call A Rabbit A Smeerp is in effect and machine-related terms with elements of the Cybertronian life-cycle mixed in are always used. This can leave characters who are not supposed to be geniuses talking as if the X-Men's Beast taught them English on the way in. They're not parents, they're "protoform batch initiators." Even the show's tagline, "More Than Meets The Eye,'' can be given onscreen as "more than meets the optic sensors."
- 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:
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.
- 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.
- 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.
New 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.
- Gohan in Dragonball Abridged has had two occasions of this so far. It's a good indicator that you've really pissed him off.
- The title of this blog post by PZ Myers.
Real Life
- 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".
- 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.
- 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.
- When attempting to explain to a friend all the egregious errors in quantum physics in the movie What the *bleep* Do We Know?, this troper encountered a wall of complete lack of knowledge that prevented any substantive discourse proceeding. That is, the person I was talking to lacked even basic science knowledge; and was attempting to understand the complexities of quantum dynamics. Needless to say, I failed miserable to explain things, since doing so would have required weeks, if not months, of teaching enough of the foundations of physics before I could even start on the quantum mechanics distorted by the movie.
- Scholarship using a post-modern framework often falls prey to this, sometimes to levels that are extreme even by the standards of academia. Occasionally this is an unfortunate side effect of discussing complicated, multi-disciplinary, and meta- ideas. Unfortunately, it also seems to be a common way to disguise the fact that one said nothing of much but in 10,000 words or more.
- This is really because its mostly garbage; 99% of it is just people trying to sound pretentious or as though they have something worthwhile to say, while the other 1% do it for those reasons but -actually- have something important to say. Virtually all of it is easily expressed in simpler language, but a lot of it sounds very stupid if it is because it loses its veneer of intellectualism. Of course, I'm a scientist and I know many scientists are little better, having read many "I need another grant" scientific papers with no actual findings.
- Post modernists also love neologisms, so if there isn't a long enough, fancy enough word they need, they just make it up.
- Anything by post-colonial feminist literary critic Gayatri Spivak.
- Or Judith Butler. But Spivak's probably worse.
- 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."
- 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'.
- Same troper, personal story: I had a biopsy taken of a couple of moles that looked not quite normal. The result came back that they were 'atypical nevi'. 'Atypical' of course means 'not-normal', and 'nevi' is the medical/latin term for 'moles'. *sigh*
- This troper's favorite: 'idiopathic'. Which means 'we don't know why it's doing that stuff'.
- Doctors also do this to obscure their communication from patients. This troper was being examined by an intern who was "presenting" to a senior doctor. The intern used lots of medical jargon I didn't understand but included "potentially carcinogenic" which I did.
- This Troper once went to the doctor's office complaining of pain between their ribs. The diagnosis came back as "Intercostal Neuralgia." What does that mean? "Pain between the ribs."
- To be fair, after four to ten years of medical school, "medical jargon" seems to most doctors to just be regular speech. Many get so used to using it that they forget most people don't know what all the words mean.
- Real Life Inversion: A doctor was examining a strange colored splotch on this teenage troper's foot. Assuming (and not unjustifiably so!) that I would not understand the technical terminology, she described it as a harmless coloration where the coloring cells were overworking themselves (or something like that - a very long series of sentences composed of short words). To which I said "Oh. So it's a benevolent hyperpigmentation." There was a pause and then laughter from the doctor. Apparently I made her day. *
This Troper has a tendency to use a variety of short or medium length words that are slightly uncommon rather than long words. So, as she's been told, she sounds smart without using gigantic words. However, some less intelligent people still insist that she's following this trope, even when she's trying to explain things in simple terms. This troper is sure many other tropers can agree with and relate to this overly-long and altogether unnecessary commentary.
- 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.
- This editor has a lot of trouble explaining his latest programs or ideas for features to include in programs to his friends and usually ends up writing several-hundred words of explanations while attempting to simplify things enough for them to understand.
- The MP3 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.
- This troper is at a loss to come up with a situation where anyone would be required to describe how an audio codec is implemented without using technobabble.
- COBOL.
- This editor doesn't grok that at all.
- 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.
- The Other Wiki has at least a few article titles like "Fictional Trans-Neptunian planets"
- What is so weirdse about that? 'Fictional' meaning 'fake', 'trans-Neptunian' meaning 'past Neptune' and 'planets' meaning 'planets'. Where is the trouble?
- 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.
- 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."
- Is it a bad sign to find the second one easier to understand than the first?
- I hope not. I understood Orwell's easier too.
- Loquacious Bible? Try this. To my knowledge, the Old Testament did not get this treatment from the same author, thank Whomever.
- Here's the NIV translation: I have seen something else under the sun:/ The race is not to the swift/ or the battle to the strong,/ nor does food come to the wise/ or wealth to the brilliant/ or favor to the learned;/ but time and chance happen to them all.
- Sesquipedalism is one possible (but not universal) symptom of Asperger's syndrome.
- Also a fun drinking game when combined with "BS".
- Having found a rather horrible fanfic once, this troper checked the reviews to see if anyone else saw the fail of the story (4/5 people sadly did not). One reviewer started off their review with an entire paragraph that seemed like they'd used a thesaurus to replace every single word they'd meant to say in order to tell the author that their topic was not a good one, as if they were trying to seem like the most intelligent person in the world. Though the illusion was not created, if it had been it would have been shattered by the fact that the next paragraph was in layman's terms and telling them how they loved the story.
- 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)
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