Were you taught to "dumb yourself down"?

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I was taught as a child by my mother to dumb myself down for the comfort of others. It's left a scar and bad habits and I'm curious if others have experienced this.

I do NOT mean if you are asked to stop correcting people, as I file that under manners.

I mean, specifically, were you taught to hide parts of your intellect to make other people more comfortable or as part of some social norm?

My wife hates it when I talk about intellectual-type subjects to her family. She wants me to talk about mundane things only. She's very controlling in that sense.

My mother used to tell me not to sound "too smart."

I was never taught that by my family, but as a kid in school there is always social pressure (from some other kids) not to act smart -- the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

As an adult, I often hide my education or knowledge so as not to stick out in some circumstances also -- I wasn't taught to do it, I just learned that it was necessary.

My mother felt like I would be teased if I sounded too "smart." (She was right).

My wife just thinks I like to show off how smart I am.

I never had to dumb myself down with speaking, because I have speech problems and I'm sure most people think I'm slightly mentally disabled.
The problem I had was with my manual cleverness. Like, I can look at something once and construct it from the detailed exploded-view picture I create in my mind. I was known as a bit of an over-achiever in that sense and I still receive quite a bit of flak for being so "clever" and "perfect".
I've purposefully worked on making things imperfect - like leaving parts of a project a little rough and unfinished - to avoid being criticized.

yes because i used a very high vocabulary as apposed to people in my class so in order to attempt to make friends, i was told to use less complex language. it didn't work though, i still didn't really make any friends

I have an extraordinarily high IQ, in the gifted range.
That said, I do not know how to dumb myself down.
On top of that, I was born with the personality of the Star Trek "Q" character
as portrayed by John DeLancie.

Such is life.

Nope.

If anything, they encouraged me the opposite. AND I sort of WANT to learn to make less mundane things sound more mundane.

And thanks to the current norm from where I live, even speaking English makes one sounded smart AND socially advanced. But would also mean make someone rather pretendious regardless on what topic spoken.

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I was taught since pre-kindergarten to never make myself stand out. The first dozen times I scored far out of my age range on testing I was spanked for either a) making my older sister look bad, b) trying to get attention or c) simply not fitting in. My mom just wanted me to blend in ( as if I ever could). The nuns thought I was trying to cause trouble by being "different" - and that usually meant another spanking when I got home. I don't know where the "embarrassing my older sister came" from, but it was my dad that hid all my test scores away so she wouldn't know what I did (they wouldn't even tell me the scores until three decades later). Somewhere around the end of the first grade, maybe second, I think I gave up and just sort of went on autopilot. I was bored out of my skull and weirdly traumatized for things that weren't my fault. So I just ...fugued. Halfway through life I've now been in enough environments to know that very few people can revel in someone else's mental abilities the way people do with say social skills, athletics, or appearance/fashion. Which to me is really weird, because watching someone brilliant work a problem through to solution (or working it with them) can be so incredibly beautiful.

^ I must have misunderstood because the poll mentioned speech.
Maybe I took that too literally.

Never happened to me.
I have been surrounded by smart people all my life.

Not really. Parents mostly liked me to talk posh and smart, so did teachers. Some of the kids at school kind of disapproved and I started to see that and switched to something more vernacular with them. It's a working class thing, I can relate to it myself to some extent, it annoys me if people show off too many big words and get too analytical. It's possible to become pretty inaccessible by talking in too highfalutin a way. Even most of the very brainy scientists I used to work with tended to talk as plainly as they could.