because 99 percent of the time they are just trying to show off. intelligence is a good thing. i hate stupid people. but there is no reason to throw around huge words with 10 syllables to get simple points across. i had a friend who used to do that all the time until they realized it made them look more like an ass than anything. i'm doing a transcription and this guy just used ubiquitous about 10 times in a row. once was fine. twice... okay. but my god, find another way to say it. and then he used it so many times i was like, what the... i began to doubt my own knowledge of what i thought the word meant. so then i had to stop and look it up.
u·biq·ui·tous adj.
Being or seeming to be everywhere at the same time; omnipresent: “plodded through the shadows fruitlessly like an ubiquitous spook” (Joseph Heller).
see, now i knew that's what it meant, he just overused it and butchered it. it is one thing to know what words mean and to use them to illustrate a point... but don't lord it over other people. and don't overuse a word. just because it was the word of the day on your tear off calendar, don't suffer the rest of the world to have to listen to you.
