Pretentious

Julien Hounsham-Lalande

Mr.Breaton

EWC4U

March 11, 2015

I Hate Hypocrites

Among some of the people I choose to spend my time with, the word “Pretentious” tend to get thrown around when I’m in their company.

“What the hell is he rambling about?”

“Don’t bother, he’s just being pretentious.”

Oh

Now, as someone who takes pride in his eloquence, I’m not someone who would take offense to this misconception, but someone who wishes to educate the simple populous on the difference between the genuine intellectual, and the poser. Therefore, I have composed this open letter to denounce the culprits who give the academics, and artists, a bad name.

To whom it may concern.

If there is one thing I have personally come to despise with every fibre of my being, it would be an over zealous display of wordiness. Each practitioner of the honourable pursuit of intellectual prowess situated before me will have almost certainly experienced an encounter with a person who finds it imperative to engage in creating an overly complex manifestation of their skill in the english language by the unnecessary complication of the syntax of their own vocal prose.

Prominent examples of this embellishment proceed as follows: an affinity for the almost religious use of pseudo-intellectual buzzwords, such as those “symbiotic relationships,” the “Synergistic management solutions”, and the “Reversing polarity of the neutron flows”; the tendency to parler with others in obscenely long monologue-like run-on sentences as to fill in every possible moment of their dialogue into a painful demonstration of their extensive knowledge by making sure to thoroughly line every phrase with unnecessary polysyllabic description; and the incredibly obvious application of synonyms in replacement of simpler, yet arguably more effective expression, as if the individual in particular has inserted a thesaurus so deeply into their own rectal cavity they have begun to spill their own liquified ego out of every facial orifice. It’s not like you’re trying to fill a word count or something.

Why these certain individuals feel it necessary to expound upon every detail of their conversation in an unprecedented assault on the sanity and patience of those unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity is beyond the realm of comprehension for a simple and humble moderate-intellectual such as I, but I shall give an attempt at deciphering the inner machinations of my arrogant, pretentious counterpart. Based upon my own experience with these unsavoury persons, my hypothesis as to the reasoning of their actions is to appear to others as being smart. Why else would we be plagued with this manner of person who feels it the utmost necessity to romanticize their daily interactions with language stylized like shakespearean verse, (even though you know the only true shakespeare they read was MacBeth in high school english,); they’re frantic, sicilian, gesticulations, and those telegraphed pregnant pauses, (Pause as if full stop,) to appear thoughtful before making a statement. It’s all just an elaborate play. I’m confident in the fact that they aren't even aware what the meaning of half their linguistic exfoliations are. “How about I just insert a obscure, complex word I once heard into this sentence, no one will be any the wiser!”

However, the most despicable attribute of these heathens responsible for this crime against  hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia (The commonly used term for the irrational fear of long words for those here of a lower education,) is the enraging actuality that those most likely to be responsible for this blatant bastardization of the revered term of “Academic” are almost certainly unbeknownst to their state. It infuriates me that one can be so blissfully unaware of their own pretentiousness.