Basic Trope: A character combines sophisticated mannerisms with swearing or slang words.
- Straight: John uses upper-class saying and witticisms but peppers them with swear words.
- Exaggerated: Lord John speaks with the formality of the King James Bible, adding various Gratuitous Latin phrases, but also drops the F-bomb in every sentence.
- Downplayed:
- John is sometimes eloquent and sometimes cusses, rarely both at once.
- John's eloquent speeches have hidden insulting messages.
- John combines crude uneuphemised sexual references with advanced technical computer jargon. A bit more "middle class" and applied than typical but still showing intellect.
- Justified:
- John originates from the lower class and is trying to look more sophisticated than he is, but has occasional slip-ups.
- John has friends from both ends of the class spectrum, and likes mixing words and phrases from both ends, just to tease them or even test his friendship with them.
- There are situations that upper-class speech can't adequately (or timely) describe/convey.
- John is eloquent but is currently quoting/paraphrasing a rather rude source.
- Inverted: Bob's speech patterns are crude with various slang words, but he never curses.
- Subverted:
- It seems that John is going to add a cuss to his formal speech, but he stops himself.
- Gay as in joyous, e.g., "Don we now our gay apparel", not as in the sexual orientation.
- Double Subverted:
- He then unleashes a motherload of curse words, continuing the same formal tone.
- John speaks like that because he gets enjoyment out of people trying to figure out what he means.
- Parodied:
- John combines cursing with random "old-timey" words like "thee", "thou", and "thine". He thinks he is the height of class, yet everyone laughs at him.
- John talks like a Street Urchin in a group of scholars and like a scholar in a group of Street Urchins. Neither audience can understand him.
- John's only intellectual knowledge is how to explicate profanity and sexual references on a technical level.
- Averted:
- John does not say highbrow and lowbrow things in the same conversation.
- John never says anything either highbrow or lowbrow.
- Enforced:
- John is a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of a person known to talk like this.
- Executives order a character who talks like this to help attract both "smart" and "stupid" audience members.
- Zig-Zagged:
- John goes through ten-minute blocks of quoting Albert Einstein, William Shakespeare, and Alexander Pope, then ten-minute blocks of nonstop, nonsensical sex talk, without stopping for breath.
- John has no qualms about crude humour or vulgarity, but expresses them in sophisticated words rather than common and vulgar ones.
- Lampshaded: "John, do you think it's funny when you alternate talking below and above your intelligence? Well, it isn't. It's just confusing to the rest of us."
- Invoked: John deliberately mixes language to demonstrate a concept clearly and challenge norms.
- Exploited: Alice teaches a class of children who are used to "hell" but not "sophisticated" language. She asks John to come in as a guest speaker to introduce them to higher concepts on their level.
- Defied: John always tailors his style of speaking to his audience. When he is among ill-mannered people who don't care for highfaluting talk, he swears profusely and uses tons of slang. When he is among well-born people who disapprove of such obscenities, he lards his speech with references to the classics and deconstructs everything around him.
- Deconstructed: John's minor slip-ups, or even his refusal to conform to other people's style of speech, angers other people and makes him lose friends. His commoner friend Alice who grew up in the slums with him and his noble friend Bob who is his colleague in the academy are the first to drop out of his life.
- Reconstructed: John makes new friends who either don't really care too much about speech, know and understand John more than as a mixing of classes, share his egalitarianism, or some combination of the above. This includes the commoner Andrew who aspires to improve himself by enrolling in the academy/military as well as the noble Bethany who wants to escape her stifling society and joins the more liberal group of friends she, Andrew, and John are in.
You have produced reams of sophistry and semantically empty pseudo-profound bullshit. Fuck off to Sophisticated as Hell, you stupid dense assholes!
