or at least look like you do:
I have recently been spending excessive amounts of time with fellow law students. You know the ones, they spend all their time making everyone else look stupid, then gloating when they’ve finally succeeded. And I - subversive, perverse creature that I am - have decided to ruin all their fun. I’m outing them. They don’t really know any more than anyone else does. They’ve just perfected the art of seeming to. In fact, I’ve discovered that even I have been used to make them look good, and get good marks while they’re at it. Here’s a few of their favourite tricks:
- Ask a question you already know the answer to. Wait a bit while everyone discusses it, then interrupt and answer the question yourself. Most people have forgotten by that stage who asked the question to begin with, so you look smart for answering the question. Unfortunately, people who aren’t busy trying to make themselves look good tend to notice this trick and find it extremely irritating.
- Make outrageous claims about anything, then when people start to disagree, claim you were only being an agent provocateur (always throw in a foreign language where possible), or a devil’s advocate (if you’ve forgotten the French). Never mind the fact that you’re not really an agent provocateur, few people know its proper meaning, and it sounds good. I had a law tutor who loved the word, and never considered the fact that there might be some students in her classes with more accurate vocabularies than hers. Although in a few cases, it might actually be true, depending on what you’re pretending to know everything about. I prefer devil’s advocate myself, since I can casually throw in words in several other languages in any given conversation, so have no real need of the foreign-sounding option. Not that I’m ever either of them, since I leave all that to those with self esteem issues.
- Speaking of self esteem, you can seem to know everything so long as you do it with confidence. If you say anything forcefully, loudly and often enough, people will just give up and not try to argue with you, thereby making you look more intelligent. Of course, you may come up against someone else trying to do the same thing, in which case it will turn into a screaming match, entertaining those around you. But you still won’t look stupid, because you obviously have a strong opinion and are sticking to it.
- Another trick is to surround yourself with smart people. When anyone asks a question, give a small, introductory-type answer to the question, and wait for one of the actually smart people to step in and provide a fuller explanation (the disadvantages to this are obvious: firstly, the people might just be pretending to be smart; secondly, they might not step in to answer, either because they’re not listening, or they don’t like you and have worked out what you’re up to).
- In a classroom situation, simply sit with your textbook open in front of you, keeping up with whatever the teacher/tutor has to say. Whenever a question is asked, simply read from the textbook. The trick here is to make it look like you’re not reading, which can be more difficult than it sounds.
Not that I condone any of this. But for those of us up against sleazy know-it-alls, any background and/or inside information we can get is necessary. I just wish that they didn’t try to make everyone else look bad so that they can look good (another of their favourite tricks that I refuse to put on the above list, since I think it’s just plain mean…)
