I wrote this pretty quickly, and a lot of the words in this were new to me (I overused Google big time). If you see any mistakes or notice anything that can be improved, definitely let me know!

—

“I possess a substantial capacity for English in both its recorded and verbalized configurations,“ I said confidently.

Erik Franklin blinked and stared at me for a long moment, before he scribbled something on his notepad.

That didn’t bode well.

___

“I didn’t get the job,” I said, collapsing backwards onto the couch with a sigh.

Claire doesn’t even bother to look up from the notebook she was writing in. How rude. “That’s what happens when you talk the way you do.”

“It was a formal interview!” I protested. “I spoke in a formal manner, as was fitting in that situation.”

“You can talk casually in a job interview, Max,” she said, glancing up at me over her glasses. “You already speak fancier than the average person. You really don’t need to be complicating it any more.”

“How is it a blunder to demonstrate to an employer that I have an excellent vocabulary?”

“It shows that you have bad word choice,” she said. “It makes it seem like you’re unable to show restraint, and it reflects poorly on your judgement.”

I gaped at her. “Excuse me — I have excellent word choice! My words are always advanced, my sentences are /always/ grammatically correct, and I know for a fact that I always use my words in a context that fits with their respective definitions.”

“That’s not what I…” Claire shut her mouth and looked away. I waited patiently for what she had to say; while she was almost certainly wrong in this instance, I do value her opinion. “It comes across the same way it does when a student pads their essays with excessively wordy phrases and unnecessarily complicated words,” she said at last.

I blinked at her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean the way some students use long or obscure words to make their essays seem impressive to teachers,” she rephrased.

“I don’t see how that’s a bad thing. I always showcased my vocabulary in my essays,” I said.

Claire stared at me for a moment before sighing. “Of course you did,” she muttered. “And how did the teachers like that?”

I crossed my arms and lifting up my chin stubbornly. “My English teachers were all incompetent,” I informed her. “They don’t understand good literature. And neither did Erik Franklin! It’s not /my/ fault he’s too stupid to understand, and clearly that work was below me, if he’s an accurate representation of who they would be looking for. I wouldn’t want to work somewhere that would entertain mediocrity like that anyway.”

Claire was shaking her head at this point. When I finished my rant, she said, “It’s not about intelligence. It’s about your ability to communicate effectively with others. If you constantly use big words, you overcomplicate communication and increase the likelihood that you will use words which those around you don’t know, thereby risking otherwise unnecessary misunderstanding and raising the amount of time and effort people have to spend figuring out what you’re trying to say.”

I stared at her for a long moment, before I slowly shook my head. She exhaled heavily, the sound filled to the brim with frustration, and she put down her pen.

“I’ll try to say this in a language you might understand,” she said, looking me directly in the eyes. “Your potentiality for accomplishment is significantly encumbered by your ineptitude for temperance and your unequivocal deficiency in even an adequate magnitude of perspicacity.”

My eyebrows rose and my eyes widened. Something nagged at my mind and I felt like I should probably try to figure out her point, but something else had taken over my focus.

Impressed, I said, “Perspicacity is a good word. What’s it mean?”