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

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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

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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