The conspicuous grandiloquence on Stanford’s campus, juxtaposed with the asserted collegial culture prompts internal inquisition. Sounds smart… Right? 

There is an epidemic permeating our campus, straining students, academic literature and Thesaurus.com alike: grandiloquence. Grandiloquence refers to the excessive use of pompous language and rhetorical flairs, especially with the intent to impress. 

We can all recall the kid in the back of our class who does not quite understand what juxtaposition means but puffs up his chest to use it anyway. Or the computer science student who eloquently morphs a humanities course into an analysis of Eigenvector Centrality and VC Dimension. A riveting combination of starry-eyed and befuddled, we all pretend to know what they are saying. The mantra of our university may as well be ‘fake it till you make it’. 

The Stanford Floating Duck Syndrome — in which students externally present the image of nonchalance while internally struggling — has weighted intellectual consequences. Students often allow performative signaling to supersede academic development, as they attempt to prove that they “deserve” to be here amidst the invisible competition that engulfs our campus. Amidst a community where we are all statistically intelligent, to showcase intellectual belonging, grandiloquence becomes attractive (even when the jargon is contextually misplaced or the adjective’s true definition is unknown).  

Language has forever been more than a means of communication; it’s a means of creating and maintaining social hierarchies. There is an inherent power in conforming with professional jargon, Eurocentric vernacular and verbosity. 

For instance, linguistic hegemony refers to the dominance of a particular language in certain spheres. Eurocentric linguistic hegemony has been a force for decades, dating back to the origins of capitalism. Because capitalism inherently implements a hierarchy, within a capitalist society, upward mobility is emphasized and can be signified by the language you use. Capitalism promotes “accent reduction” and “Business English” as a show of class, associating Eurocentric linguistics with economic prosperity. 

Because capitalism and racism are linked  — with the very creation of the race stemming from imperialistic and economic justifications —Eurocentric linguistic hegemony has contemporary impacts, as emphasized  by the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) and American College Test’s (ACT) biases against low-income,Black and Latino students. Rather than being an indicator of merit, SAT and ACT scores  are more closely related to an applicants’ household income and race. In fact, it can be argued that SAT pre-testing questions — unscored questions that, if deemed fair and quality enough, will be included in future SATs — had their origin in eugenics. In 2000, Jay Rosner, executive director of The Princeton Review Foundation, evaluated SAT tests from 1998 and 2000, ultimately discovering that Black and Latino students scored lower than their white counterparts on all of the pretesting questions included. 

To step out of the educational linguistic canon is to place yourself in the lion’s den.

As a member of the African American community, the thought of utilizing African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in educational spheres feels inconceivable, despite the vernacular being dictated by formal rules and conventions. Estimates suggest that almost 30 million African Americans nationally speak AAVE. In theory, to master AAVE is to invite connection with a larger audience and to ensure mass information dispersal. But because at Stanford, your presumed intellect is contingent on your ability to perform, sometimes it feels like the double negatives of AAVE or the invariant verbs of Gullah are markers of intellectual incapabilities. Thus, in class, I often rely upon grandiloquence and stumble through performative verbosity, my point getting lost through the display. Ironically, grandiloquence does the opposite of what AAVE does, as it ostracizes communities amidst a ploy of haughtiness and in the process, fails to educate the masses. 

“It’s not what you say. It’s how you say it.”

This is a mantra that has permeated educational spheres and is part of mass culture.  But it is not quite right — or at least, it should not be. Based on this phrase, it’s supposedly more important to focus entirely on the delivery rather than providing fresh assertions with substance. This should be the antithesis of academia: a field where reciprocity between the teacher and the student is paramount to learning. The most intelligent people are not those whose syntax triumphs over those of their peers or those whose vocabulary parallels that of a thesaurus. Instead, they are those who have the ability to present complex ideas in plain language: a testament to true mastery. 

However, the epidemic of grandiloquence is not solely the fault of students; instead, it is necessary to acknowledge the faults of academia at-large. Linguistic inequality reinforced educational inequality. When scientific research utilizes niche jargon or when political doctrine employs legalese, it risks alienating readers who do not have similar educational backgrounds. This effectively stratifies the audience to those of certain social classes. This is controversial as the topics discussed in political texts, legal doctrine and scientific research, affects the masses, not only those in elite academic institutions. 

Sure, we cannot expect a neurosurgeon to explain a canioplasty solely using colloquial words. Yet, greater problems spur when broader academic conversations fail to connect with the people. It establishes knowledge as a status symbol rather than a tool of reciprocity and social improvement . 

So, what is the solution? Shall everyday language replace verbosity? Should scientific papers employ differing vernacular? 

“It’s not how you say it. It’s what you say.” We must shift the educational zeitgeist and reconstruct the way we define intellect. I argue for the democratization of linguistics through clarity efforts; this rhetoric is not synonymous with “dumbing down” one’s linguistics — instead, it argues that building an informed public is more important than verbose linguistic performance. 

And so I challenge you: the next time you are in class or writing a research paper, do not hide your shaky concept comprehension with Thesarus.com. Instead, push for concept clarification — because academia should push for individual understanding that translates into mass application.