Originally Posted By: Faldage
We could make something up and claim it's from Mark Twain:

"It's important to know a bunch of fancy words. If folks can't understand what you're saying because you're using a lot of foot-and-a-half long words, they'll assume you're really intelligent and they'd better do what you say."


Bertrand Russell made a similar jest by suggesting that if you want to be a successful philosopher and still write simply and clearly that you must first write a book with impenetrable mathematics - not as practice for yourself, but more as a signal to your audience that you are capable of being just as obscure as the next philosopher.