I've spent a decent amount of time in academia, and I came to the same conclusion a while back. Nobody talks like that, nobody thinks like that. It is literally what you said about using a thesaurus, people just use smarter sounding words to give their argument more credence. It just muddles the message and makes the point indecipherable, but, hey, it sure sounds smart, huh? There's a reason I hate having to do any kind of structured learning anymore, because it's invariably this kind of petty academic bullshit of people using pre-thought talking points to sound smarter than they are.