I was browsing over at Improbable Research, the purveyors of the (in)famous Ig Noble Awards, when I stumbled across this 2006 Ig Noble Award winner for linguistics: Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: problems with using long words needlessly.
My first impression is Awesome! The link to download the pdf cost money, though. Lame. Stupid researchers wanting to make money on their research.
Anyways, Daniel M. Oppenheimer of Princeton University wanted to know if padding your essay with unnecessarily big words had the desired effect of leaving an impression of elevated intelligence. His research uncovered a negative correlation between complexity and judged intelligence. He also made a discovery that confirmed one of my long-held suspicions: texts printed in hard-to-read fonts were judged to be less written by less intelligent authors. In other words, the appearance of the words on the page matters.
