insecurity
I often notice myself phrasing things in a really pretentious way and I worry people are gonna think I'm a real tosser. I don't mean to, it's just how it comes out! I can write more casually, but it often feels like an affectation.
It's been like this since at least high school. I remember having a chat with some of my classmates on graduation about how their first impression of me was during name call first day of school when everyone just said "here!" when their name was called, but I said "in attendance" and they thought I was just a super-pretentious prick XD
If I'm gonna take a guess, it's some combination of neurodivergence, bibliophilia and english as a second language. (A lot of latin-derived words are similar in many languages, but also read as more complicated, so if you don't know the simple word for something, it can be easy to reach for something more technical.)
@Owlor Haha, a recent Cat Situation has obliged me to brush up quickly on my Spanish and I was giggling the other day about how much I can get away with just by speaking in the fanciest, most Latinesque Spanglish I can, because THAT MOSTLY WORKS ACTUALLY.
There's a good story about it in RIchard Feynman's "Surely You're Joking" autobiography, too. He got remarkably far in Brazil on words like "consequentamente" and people just thought he was super-literate instead of a dumb American. :D :D :D
