There are many very important people in the community. We are surrounded by them. And they are very easy to spot. They are the people who don’t have to obey road rules like the rest of us. They don’t have to obey social distancing rules. They can talk very loudly on their mobile phones anywhere they want whenever the urge arises. Stand back and let them at it. After all, they are talking to other very important people about extremely vital things.

Some very important people are also very smart. While you don’t have to be very smart to be very important, you can’t be very smart without also being very important. Once you recognise how smart you really are, you have no choice but to let others know. It is not possible to have a mind like a steel trap without demonstrating that capability to mere mortals. They need to know.

The preferred method of doing this is with ornamental language. It is simply not good enough to say, “The cat sat on the mat.” Nobody will understand. One must say that, “It is tolerably clear that the cat sat on the mat,” or that, “The cat manifestly is in equipoise on the mat.” And for pity’s sake pepper your sentences liberally with “ought”, but never followed by the infinitive of the verb, for example “to do”. At school, we were taught to avoid big words. That essentially meant unusual words or uncommonly used words. This lesson was only directed at the masses and not the intellectual elite. It is entirely acceptable for those with brains the size of planets to use all manner of odd words even when the meaning is wrong. For instance, if I were very smart, I would use the word “integer” to describe an element of something. I would talk in tropes not tongues. I would winnow facts not analyse or look at them. I would never say “Yes”; I would always say “Quite”.

Ornamental language is pretentious. It is the use of unnecessary verbiage, superlatives, and gargantuan or abstruse words. It is best implemented with a tone from a PG Wodehouse play. I would try to avoid it.