hi everyone and welcome back to love English I'm Sabrah your British
University English teacher and today we're going to be looking at 12 long
English words that are going to make you sound a little bit more sophisticated
and a little bit more intellectual now I could have given you words like
anti-establishmentarianism or floccinaucinihilipilification but I didn't think
that those words were going to be as useful for you so these words that we're
going to look at today they are actually commonly used in everyday speech and
conversation so they're still going to be useful even though they do sound a
little bit more intellectual or eloquent
number one is obfuscating obfuscating and this is a verb and this means to
make something less clear or confusing or to hide the meaning of something it
can also be that you avoid answering a question so you kind of confuse or you
skirt around the question it's something that often politicians do when they're
asked difficult questions they can often obfuscate and sort of confuse the
interviewer as they don't want to necessarily be pinned down on that topic
let me give you an example because I'm a sympathetic and kind teacher I try not
to use language that could obfuscate my students now if you want to use this in
conversation you could say sorry I think your obfuscating on this meaning please
could you be clearer or you're making me confused or would you mind not
obfuscating speak frankly number two is a beautiful word it is
scintillating scintillating and if something is scintillating it's very
interesting brilliant lively or witty so we often
describe conversation as scintillating we might say well that was a really
scintillating debate on the television something really engaged you or the
conversation at dinner was scintillating if you want to compliment somebody you
could say what a lovely evening the company's been scintillating the next
word is fastidious fastidious which is quite a hard word to pronounce
fastidious and this means you've really got an eye for detail you're obsessive
about certain details getting things right to the point where it can be
annoying for other people if you're fastidious about cleaning you want the
place to be spotless if somebody had leaves a dirty cup around you'll be
upset if there's a crumb on the floor you'll want to hoover the sign of Virgo
are supposed to be quite fastidious people meticulous is also a synonym if
you know that word as well to be meticulous fatstidious can be a good
thing but if it's taken to the extreme it can be a bad thing so we'll often say
oh she was so fastidious about the food maybe she was too fussy too particular
now of course a great way to quickly improve your vocabulary and start
understanding a lot of these more complex words and complex sentences a
great way to do this is of course to have a teacher or to study with a school
now we recently told you about this school but we want to tell you a little
bit more about them they're called the language gallery and they have online
classes as well as actual physical schools in some great locations in the
UK and in Canada in the UK their schools are in London Nottingham and Birmingham
all in great central occasions and they also have schools in Vancouver and
Toronto so very exciting locations they're an extremely professional
British Council accredited school and you can study online with them as well
as being able to learn IELTS English for work general English and also University
preparation which you can also do online so if you're thinking that you would
like to be part of a smart intellectual environment and go to University in
England then you can do this you can prepare for this and get direct entry
through studying with the language gallery they run what is called a
pre-sessional program for university studies which means if you complete this
program and you do not need IELTS you will go directly into a UK university
the English universities which you would get direct entry to are Greenwich Bangor
De Montford and Plymouth so you could be studying at a British University in
September or October now if you book now guys there is 20% off so it's a
great offer and it's not available for much longer and it goes for the
pre-sessional course of the university preparation course you can get the 20%
of that and also any of their online courses so if you are interested guys
head down to the description box below to find out more number four is
incorrigible incorrigible now if you're incorrigible which is a little bit of a
mouthful to say as well incorrigible l then you are somebody who has bad
behaviour which is very difficult to reform or improve if your mum says to you uff
you're incorrigible it means oh you're
badly
behaved and it's really hard to improve you or make you change we can often
tease each other and say this word if we want to say that somebody's been
particularly bad maybe they're making rude jokes or doing something which is a
little inappropriate but it's funny we can say you're incorrigible meaning
you're terrible so it's a way to replace terrible really in that sense when we're
joking so we could say an incorrigible criminal meaning a criminal who could
not be reformed in any way they were that bad
number five is flummoxed to be flummoxed this is a better way than to say you're
confused if you're flummoxed you're confused you're perplexed you don't
understand something and we can also say that something is flummoxing meaning
confusing we can say hmm this this illness is flummoxing I just can't
understand quite what it is lots of students find the present perfect tense
in English quite flummoxing they're quite confused by it and they can't make
sense of it certainly when I was learning the conjunctive in Italian I
was very flummoxed by it and I did have a problem trying to understand it so it
was very flummoxing number six I'm going to share with you one of my favorite
English words this is bamboozled bamboozled I just think it has such a
fantastic sound bamboozled to be bamboozled and this means to be tricked
to be deceived often by confusing a person a great synonym actually is to
hoodwink we often say to hoodwink as well so this is where the person is
somehow tricked but you've done it by confusing them so you've bamboozled them
and somehow you've tricked them in that process you've confused them and then
you've managed to cheat them out of something or trick them into doing
something so sometimes if you're trying to get someone to agree to something you
might bamboozle them so you might confuse them about the situation so it
almost feels like they have no option but to agree you have to be quite clever
to do that another example would be the criminal hoped his disguise would
bamboozle the police at the airport number seven is nefarious nefarious and
this means that something is morally bad particularly
involving morally bad activities or practices so if you say well I think the
politician was involved in some nefarious activities it means some
corrupt or some morally wrong activities so it's a it's a negative adjective so
we do read it a lot in the newspaper particularly when it's talking about
people who are in the public eye who may have been involved in some activities
which were unethical corrupt morally wrong in some way if you think that
somebody is up to no good you can actually say this as a joke you could
say you might not be up to anything nefarious number eight is quintessential
quintessential it's a beautiful word actually quintessential and this means
to be typical of something or the most important part of something to almost be
quite typically representative of a particular group or place James Bond is
the quintessential English man or we could say tapas is the quintessential
cuisine of Spain it's a lovely word if you're looking for
a word that replaces the word typical which you might use a lot replace it
with quintessential number nine is sycophantic sycophantic quite a long
word again a bit difficult to sycophantic this is another adjective
which is when somebody is trying to be really nice to somebody but it's
insincere and they do it for their own good so if you're a sycophant you're
being so nice and so adoring of a particular person because you want your
own gain out of this you want something from it so people can sometimes be like
this around their boss or around perhaps a very popular person that they want
something from or anything like this but it's a very negative adjective because
everything they're doing is completely insincere so you could say his
sycophantic behavior around the boss made me sick
we can also use this word in the noun so if somebody is like this they can be
described as a sycophant number ten again another one of my favourite word's
this one is salubrious salubrious and this means health giving in good
condition if we talk about a salubrious area we mean an area that looks in good
condition somewhere that looks as if it's in a good state is healthy if you
like or you could say the water is particularly salubrious in that region
meaning it gives you health it's very healthy or I see you're having a very
salubrious diet again meaning healthy there so if you're looking for a nice
replacement to healthy which sounds more formal and impressive good in your IELTS
exam for example you can use this word number 11 is surreptitiously
surreptitiously and this means secretly or discreetly in some way without other
people knowing or without many people knowing kind of a little bit like sneaky
which would be the informal version so you don't want other people to see
because perhaps you're doing something that is wrong or that you feel guilty
about it could be something like this so for example if I see my students looking
at their phones in class they don't always do it blatantly they don't always
do it obviously they do it surreptitiously so they have their phone
on their desk and then they look down quickly and then look back at me but
obviously I know that they've looked at their phone maybe they're looking at the
time or if they had a message but they don't do it obviously because that would
be very rude they do it surreptitiously or you could say she was on a diet but
she surreptitiously had a few pieces of chocolate so she secretly or sneakily
without other people knowing had some chocolate number 12 is flabbergasted
flabbergasted great word it sounds very Germanic to me if you speak German do
tell me in the comments is this a German word or does this have a Germanic root
I'd be interested to know now flabbergasted is extremely surprised if
you're flabbergasted your mouth can open you're so shocked about something so if
you say I'm flabbergasted you just you can't believe it it's the extreme of
surprised or to be shocked it's not necessarily negative it just means that
you're very surprised you weren't expecting that news so we could say mr.
Smith was flabbergasted when he found out that his daughter was engaged he
didn't even know she had a boyfriend my boyfriend was a
a bit flabbergasted when I told him I was pregnant he did get over it very
quickly but I do remember that his his jaw fell quite a bit more than normal
right everyone they were our 12 long words to make you sound more smart and
intellectual I do hope you find occasion to use them do start replacing some of
the boring everyday words we use with these much more interesting words and
have some fun with that if you want to try and use any of them in a sentence
please do that in the description box below or you can even share a long
English word that you like don't forget guys if you're interested in studying
with the language gallery then head down to the description box below for more
info we'll see you soon on love English bye bye