Were you taught to "dumb yourself down"?

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Quite right, IMO, showing off a big vocabulary might convince some that they're dealing with a smart person, but truly smart people know how to communicate their ideas effectively with words that make sense to pretty much everybody. I doubt that there are many people who truly dislike intelligent people as such, I think they just don't like showoffs and being blinded with obscure jargon.

If there are still some people around who are scared of intelligent women, that's a separate but important issue. To me it seems really odd because I've worked alongside bright scientists of both genders all my life, in workplaces and education.

If you spend your time around other intelligent and highly educated people you may not notice the stigma because other smart people aren't as likely to be insecure about their intelligence and angry about feeling trapped. If you grew up in a working-class environment, however, you might notice more encouragement to dumb yourself down and encounter more resistence when you do or say anything that demonstrates intelligence. People who feel un- or under-educated and stuck where they grew up can be really bitter about it and anyone who shows traits of maybe being able to get educated and get away and get out into the world via their intelligence becomes a threat and a source of resentment. That was my experience growing up amongst kids whose parents never went to university, and who never expected to be able to go to university themselves and get away from their hometown because of that, while I was being told my entire childhood that I should expect to be able to go to university and get away from my home town because I was clever. Lots of people resented me for that even though I hadn't even gone yet--just the idea that I might have enough smarts to get free of the cage that is small-town working-class life was enough to dislike me.

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What kind of thing would set them off?

I never really used a big vocabulary to show off. It was how my professor parents talked, and I followed their example. Also, I'm pretty sure my dad was Asperger's, and when my mom read the description of ASD, she thought she might be a little bit too. Our dinner conversations were about things like evolution, astronomy, history, music, and politics. When we went on long trips, Dad would point out the rock formations exposed by the road cuts and talk about folds and geologic epochs and extrusions (he was a geology professor). Mom was a music education professor and very interested in education methods and also genealogy. She could recite her family history going all the way back to 1635 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. My parents praised me for knowing the answers to things, so I expected to be praised for knowing the answers at school. I was so very wrong about that.

When i started school, it was a big culture shock. I used words because I loved the way they sounded, their great variety and nuanced meanings. I never meant for anyone to feel bad about them, so it took several years for me to understand that people might think I was showing off or putting them down.

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Sure, showing off doesn't have to be narcissistic. Your mother showed you off in front of guests, so you innocently thought that anybody else would be as impressed or pleased as they were if you repeated the behaviour to them.

Was I taught to? No. Did I learn to? Yes.

No one likes that kid in class that always knows the right answer or who uses the big words. No one likes it if you know too much.

Granted I still didn't make many friends but at least I wasn't actively disliked.

I can relate so much to this, especially the last bit there--my dad especially read a LOT like I did and was kind of a walking encyclopedia, and both my parents encouraged me to read and ask questions about things and delighted in my expanding vocabulary and my curiosity about the sciences and about life. I thought I would get the same reaction from others when I went to school but was quickly disabused that this characteristic of mine would be appreciated by most other people other than the (good) teachers I had. The other students always assumed I used words they didn't understand because I was trying to show off, when my choice of words had nothing to do with them and everything to do with how I delighted in words and loved the potential precision of language when you have so many words with slightly varying definitions to choose from.

Early on I didn't even anticipate that the words that I knew weren't words that everyone used, especially other kids my age and didn't anticipate them not being understood by or familiar to everyone. I have just always loved to play with and collect words, and was initially quite surprised that everyone assumed I was doing it to be boastful rather than just for pure enjoyment. I thought other kids would be as happy to learn new words as I was. I thought my motivations were obvious, but people will attribute things to your motivations based on their own insecurities and fears--it took me a long time to learn this.

I find the big words and fancy language and actual intellectual ability don't correlate, at least in the people around me.
Even an opposite trend seems to apply, the people who use fancy language and lots of jargon and are most fluent at speaking seem the worst at doing smart things.

*shrugs* I suppose it depends on what you define as "smart things." My brain is a mixed bag of bright and stupid--i can be very good with book smarts, doing well on tests, and doing abstract things like working with computers, BUT I can be extraordinarily inept at practical, "real world" matters--keeping to a budget, keeping to a schedule, cooking a meal more complicated than a microwave meal, following directions, making decisions, or remembering anything outside of my narrow set of interests. Practically anything in the physical world confounds me. I've been mostly banned from the kitchen by my wife because I got distracted and set fire to things a couple of times. I'm the stereotypical absent-minded nerd.

I don't intend to use jargon to obscure my meaning or make myself sound smarter than I am or act as a euphemism for an unpleasant reality. I know the sort of person you mean, because I encounter them a lot in the corporate world. Sometimes the words I use just seem like the best fit to me.

The "dumbing down" pressure I got in school wasn't just to use simpler language (which is not always a bad thing), but to actually perform more poorly in school and to not answer the teacher's questions so much. Because some schools graded on the Bell curve, a student who got high grades could skew grades for the lowest performers.

Looking back, I wonder if my brother told me that smart girls don't get dates because he was struggling in school and felt resentful. I'm pretty sure that he had a learning disability, because he had trouble learning to read and generally struggled until he got to college. He improved so much that he got a scholarship to study geology, so he was definitely smart.

If people can be fans of proxy-warrior teams playing sports for profit, they can also be fans of language!

Yeah, I know. I'm in a minority. But I've found enough people like me that I don't care. I *like* words.