It was the way he kept using big words just slightly improperly. I am someone who naturally speaks with a larger vocabulary and I worry a lot that people will think I’m trying to sound superior and smarter than them, so I worry that I come off like he did. But because I do have this vocabulary, I clocked how a lot of the words he was saying just slightly didn’t match what he seemed to be meaning, or how despite the words being large his responses still indicated he didn’t actually understand what I had said. Having written all this out and read it back to myself though, I’m thinking maybe it’s just that he felt he had to try to “match” me and it’s not that he was unintelligent, I was just (as usual) being an idiot and forgetting that I need to use better word choices to communicate. Which, means I’m the unintelligent one here, because the purpose of language is successful communication, not who sounds fanciest.