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Psuedo-intellectualism, or Sucking in your Mephitic Pseudocoelom |
As I am at my wits’ end on a Tuesday night, I have decided to delve deep into the..er..depths of my soul and examine my self-worth and spiritual state. After crying my eyes out and indulging in the torture a few Macs with some heavy-duty apparatus complete with electromagnetic suction cups straight out of the Princess Bride, I came up with a good excuse for my sorry existence and decided that I am a pseudointellectual. A wise person once said, “A pseudointellectual is a person who knows what "pseudo" means.” This person had no idea what they were talking about. But, since I don’t, either, this suits the article and me quite nicely.
Pseudointellectualism
can be literally translated as false-intelligence.
Pseudointellectuals pass off false knowledge as truth.
I think being a psuedointellectual who comes off as truly smart
takes more work than actually being smart.
You don’t have to know everything, but you have to know just
enough to convince the person you’re talking to that you know exactly
what you’re talking about. Smart
people know what they’re talking about anyway, so they don’t even have
to try, and where’s the fun in that?
Pseudointellectualism is an art, as intricate and exact as
lockpicking or taking naps, and as mind-numbingly intensive, too.
Let
us examine the comic below. Calvin and Hobbes is a supergood comic. It demonstrates pseudointellectualism at its best.
You see how hard Susie has to work?
She doesn’t know the answer, but she makes one up for Calvin’s
benefit. An example of the
altruism often displayed by pseudointellectuals—Susie doesn’t want to
leave Calvin with the emotional trauma and nail-biting anxiety of not
knowing the answer to the problem, so, out of the goodness of her heart,
she contrives a reasonable answer for him.
This brings us to the main principle of pseudointellectualism—you
have no idea what you’re talking about, but neither do they.
For
example, two people could be having a conversation.
Matt:
“Suck your gut in and walk straight, boy!”
Mark:
“But I’m a mephitic pseudocoelomic!”
In
most cases, the word “pseudocoelomic” would immediately trigger the
connotation of a horrible, debilitating disease in Matt’s mind, when in
fact, Mark is trying to say that he has a stinky false body cavity, which
has nothing to do with sucking in his gut, but makes Mark sound really
intelligent.
Matt:
“Ohh… I’m sorry. *sympathetically-lowered
eyes*
Mark:
“*dramatic sigh* Begone and leave me to my abaxial hebetude, you
squamous nematode, before I am forced to defenestrate myself into an
urticating swale!”
(“Go
away and leave me to my dull condition away from the axis, you scaly
roundworm, before I have to throw myself out the window into a nettle-like
stinging shallow depression!”)
Now
would be the time when Matt goes and looks up all of the words he can
remember in the dictionary. Hopefully,
he will never figure out that Mark has said a bunch of rubbish.
He will probably leave the conversation with a newfound sense of
awe and respect for Mark. Mark
has just squashed a few horribly unrelated words into a butchered
semblance of a sentence, but man, does he sound smart.
All
different kinds of people can be good pseudointellectuals.
Some people are quiet and convincing in their soft-spoken
earnestness. Others wave
their arms around and shout to distract people and exude an air of brash
confidence. Of course, there is always the supercool..er..dorky nerd who
everybody think knows everything. It
helps if you look wear big glasses and look really geeky, too, like I do.
It’s very simple—remember this—it’s 50% knowledge, 50%
confidence, and 50% misdirection and distraction.
If you’re lacking in one thing, you can make up for it by
increasing the other.