Some time back, I was branded “pretentious” by a friend of a friend because I used some “SAT words” in conversation.
Maybe because I read a lot, or enjoy leaning words, I tend to use some “big” words, kinda like you usually only run into while studying for the SAT or something. My wife enjoys when I do it, but she points it out to me so I don’t come off as a douche-wad to other people. I don’t really care though.
Some words I’ve used with some regularity over the years:
I’m a bit of an architecture nerd and I’m not afraid to use the word fenestration. Bonus points if you can use it as the antepenultimate word in a sentence.
Impetus is one I use every few weeks when I need to know the impetus of something.
Circumambulate if I want to ask somebody to walk around the building with me.
I love perfectly cromulent words.
Terse, banal, and subterfuge (though I can’t think of a good way to slip the latest into a work email) seem commonplace IMO. Maybe banal is a little unorthodox.
Nonplussed is useless, because you can’t know how your audience will interpret it (and whether they will think you are using it correctly). The original (and outside the US, still current) meaning is to be confused by something… whereas the popular (to the extent the word is popular) US meaning is to be unperturbed by something.
So it either means confused or not confused, depending on the geography and education of your audience.
Oh, I used the word ‘attenuate’ once and it seemed almost nobody knew what that meant. Including my boss, who was a PhD economist and pretty well read. Or so I thought!
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