Name: Disgustingly educated.

Age: About 18 months.

Appearance: Gross.

Ah, gross from the Latin word grossus, meaning dense, bulky and unrefined. Oh God, not you too. What absolutely rubbish behaviour this is. You make me sick.

Because I happen to know things? No, because you go around rubbing it in everyone’s faces. You know what you are?

At a push, based on context, I’d wager that I’m disgustingly educated. Exactly! Everyone’s at it, you know. I’ve had enough.

Enough of education? No, because it’s not school or uni that makes you disgustingly educated. You get it from – shudder – wanting to improve yourself.

An example, please. In 2024, corners of Reddit started to fill up with guides on how to become disgustingly educated. Some were lists of improving books, nonfiction essays or old films.

So far so good. But now it’s all over the place. Even TikTok is full of people telling users to read specific books if they want to boost their knowledge of Greek mythology or extinction cycles or emotional intelligence.

What’s wrong with that? Because it’s just reading books, isn’t it? It’s something that people have managed to do for thousands of years without making a fuss, and now it’s being rebranded by TikTokers as a sign of extreme cleverness.

Well, yes, but those old-timey people didn’t have phones. Oh, I see. So this is less about being an autodidact and more about making a show of improving your attention span and impulse control by going offline for meaningful periods of time?

That seems about right. And the thing that’s going to encourage that is videos of influencers telling you to read about ancient Egypt?

Don’t be a snob. I’m not being a snob. I’m just worried that a trend like this going viral on something as shallow as TikTok will lead to a rise of pseudointellectualism. The achievement of actually knowing things is going to be superseded by a grim desire to simply look as if you know things for likes.

That’s definitely a danger, but in this day and age it’s a start. I guess you’re right. Maybe it isn’t such a bad thing. After all, you’re disgustingly educated enough to know the etymology of the word “gross”.

Actually, I looked that up on ChatGPT. Oh. I guess the age of outsourcing disgusting intelligence to robots begins now.

Do say: “Nothing is cooler than being disgustingly educated.”

Don’t say: “I just Photoshopped a picture of me in a bikini and a mortarboard.”