Little Professor Dialog

Calvin sure doesn't sound like he's 6.

Kids that speak by throwing around big words that you'd usually find in scientific journals or old English texts. This is either an indicator of the kid being a prodigy or trying to simply sound like one. Often combined with Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness.

Possibly justified if the character is Wise Beyond Their Years or acts their intellectual age. See also From the Mouths of Babes and Most Writers Are Adults. Contrast Totally Radical.

Examples of Little Professor Dialog include:

Advertising

• Used in the E-Trade commercials featuring a baby that apparently knows more about investing money than most adults. This is Played for Laughs and not intended to be taken seriously.

"Just a man and his thoughts. [Beat] And his iPhone."

• • Somewhat more recently was an advert for Evian that had everyone turning into babies, but still able to walk and perform skateboard stunts. It teeters between Fridge Horror and Nightmare Fuel depending on the audience.

Anime and Manga

• The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya: Kyon. The offhand math references, the science, the multi-cultural references, ancient philosophy, history, phonetics. All from a supposedly average High School Student. Top that with how his choice of words and terminology even in casual dialogue, in Japanese, makes him sound like someone in their 50's. Then again he is telling the story in the past tense... That, and Kyon is heavily hinted to be much, much smarter than he lets on, occasionally. After all, he did solve the Remote Island Incident with little help.

Comic Books

• Features heavily in PS238, mostly from children who are Wise Beyond Their Years such as Zodon, Victor and Tom (Murphy may or may not count. As a child, that is). USA Patriot and American Eagle also do this a lot, though much of what they're saying sounds more like rehearsed talking points than things they've come up with on their own. Most of the kids avert it, however.
• Inverted, straightened, riffed upon, and generally explored in the Mad Magazine article "How to Rewrite Your Way to a PHD".

Fan Works

• Harry Potter fan fiction depicting Hermione Granger's life before Hogwarts generally give her this trait; in at least one such story, "Little Professor" is actually an affectionate nickname given to her by her parents.
  • In Hermione Granger and the Boy Who Lived, her parents called her "Professor Exposition".

Film

• In The Man With Two Brains, when Steve Martin, playing a brain surgeon, hits a woman with his car he turns to the little girl standing nearby and tells her to phone his hospital, giving her explicit medical instructions. She repeats everything back word for word and the dialogue continues as follows:

Girl: Sounds like a subdural hematoma to me.
Dr. Hfuhruhurr: Oh, it does, does it? Well, it's not your job to diagnose.
Girl: But I thought...
Dr. Hfuhruhurr: You thought, you thought. Just go. Three years of nursery school and you think you know it all. Well, you're still wet behind the ears. It's not a subdural hematoma. It's epidural. Ha.

• This was featured heavily in The Wizard, where all the kids talk like drug dealers and the adults talk like, well, kids.
• The little girl at the end of Spider-Man 3 haggled like a professional adult and managed to con a fully grown man.
• Henry talked like this in The Good Son.
• North and Winchell from North. But then again, the entire point of North is that the bulk of the movie is a hallucination being experienced by a bigoted so-called child prodigy with an over-inflated sense of his own importance, so maybe that's not so surprising.

Literature

• All of the kids in Ender's Game are ostensibly precocious child prodigy geniuses, making this less unlikely than it would seem.
• Another Pre-Teen Genius, Artemis Fowl, uses this extensively as well. The Eternity Code sees him scare the wits out of an ordinary waitress with his adult (and ultra-sophisticated) behavior, and in The Time Paradox it gets put into perspective when we realize that the "present" Artemis is actually a lot better at acting his age than he was when he was 10. It is tempting to blame Parental Abandonment for this, but The Time Paradox also revealed that he was acting—and speaking—like that even before his father went missing.Though he still thinks like a kid in some ways; in the first book, Holly says something sarcastic about lollipops as she's making her escape, and Artemis' first two thoughts are, in order, that he doesn't like lollipops, and that using the word "lollipop" is beneath the dignity of his intellect. Which, of course, leads one to the question of how he plans to patronize children himself when he grows up.
• Kendra and Seth from the Fablehaven books often use large vocabularies and explain concepts that a thirteen and fifteen-year-old wouldn't be able to fathom. Of course, seeing all of the other words thrown into the narration of the story, the author may just be trying to get kids to learn how to use a dictionary.
• Lampshaded in The Wee Free Men.

"Zoology, eh? That's a big word, isn't it."
"No, actually it isn't," said Tiffany. "Patronizing is a big word. Zoology is really quite short."

• • Justified at the same time - the Achings only own so many books, and one of them is a dictionary. Also humorously subverted in that Tiffany doesn't know how to pronounce some of the longer or more unusual words. Which is typical of children who learn words from reading books instead of from hearing them.
• Animorphs was notorious for having the teenagers switch back and forth between having way too much knowledge for their ages and not using contractions to asking incredibly stupid questions and speaking like the author's not-quite-accurate impression of how teenagers sound.
• Played for laughs in A Spy in the Neighborhood with smart preteen Paul, who goes into too much detail about mundane things in an almost stereotypically Asperger's-like fashion.
• * This trope is one of the many discussed in George Elliot's essay Silly Novels by Lady Novelists. At one point, Elliot quotes a fragment from one such silly novel where an alleged four-year old talks in extremely purple Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, and describes the kid character as exhibiting "symptoms so alarmingly like those of adolescence repressed by gin."

Live Action TV

• Inverted, ironically, in Wesley Crusher; though he's supposed to be a little professor, he sometimes talks like someone half his age. The first season episode "The Naked Now" has him saying "It was an adult who did it!", for example.
• Dawson's Creek was forged out of this in the fires of Mt. Doom. It was clever at first... then just annoying.
  • This was actually lampshaded in a commercial for reruns on TBS. It went something like, "They act like kids, but they don't talk like kids. Coming up next... Dawson's Creek!"
• Both Frasier and Niles Crane on Frasier, in flashbacks to when they were kids. Also evident in excerpts of their childhood writing, like journals, essays, etc.
• Henry Dillon from Shake It Up. He's a 8 year old super genius.

Newspaper Comics

• Peanuts arguably pioneered this trope, between Charlie Brown's expositions on his anxieties, Linus quoting various authors & philosophers, and of course Lucy and her "Psychiatric Help" booth.
• Calvin and Hobbes featured allegedly six-year-old Calvin, who didn't talk like any six-, or even twelve-, year-old that most of us have ever met. Bill Watterson sometimes lampshaded this by having Calvin follow up a spate of Little Professor Dialog with a more typical six-year-old reaction.
  • The whole joke of about one third of the strips is Calvin expressing a stupid idea natural to a six-year-old with the language of an adult. For example, when he justifies spending an afternoon collecting frogs by saying: "I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul."
• In Non Sequitur, Danae embodies this trope to a tee, but with an alarmingly good justification. She largely bases her assumptions on what is acceptable social behavior by watching politicians and pundits on television. When she emulates them, she'll use the words pretty much the same way they do—to make a bizarre political point. In spite of the fact that she only uses very basic mimicry to develop her points, she is still able to gain think-tank funding and cable news time because her arguments end up indistinguishable from legitimate pundits—even though her thesis is usually something ridiculous like "boys are boogerbrains".
• In fact, pretty much any newspaper comic where a kid character is supposed to represent some element of the adult world is an example of this:
  • The Argentinian comic strip Mafalda was published and set during the Cold War and revolved around the titular character, a little girl (5 years old at the start of the comic, though she aged in real time) who was deeply concerned about humanity and world peace, and would comment at length about the geo-political situation at the time. Her friends, while not concerned about politics, would also frequently talk like adults. However, Mafalda was the most extreme case and often lampshaded at times, such as her parents occasionally telling her to worry about things "her own age" and her friends occasionally tiring of her musing.
• A Dilbert comic portrayed the title character as a child trying to get permission to skateboard near a construction site. When his mom brought up the "Jump Off a Bridge" Rebuttal, he replied "Well, that would depend on many factors, including height, training, and equipment. But if 100% of the people who jumped off cliffs said they enjoyed it, as in my skateboard example, then I would conclude that it was safe. A better question might have been, 'If everyone wore clothes, would you do that?'" Rule of Funny, of course.
• Frazz regularly employs 5-9 year old students more intelligent than most adults. The other main character aside from Frazz himself, the irresistable Caulfield, plays a bored genius who has read more books in a month than most adults do a year and spouts observations about life and culture like nobody's business. Every other student Frazz gets to know likewise seem to carry inexplicable wisdom that, if only put into the hands of their administrators, would probably fix many of America's public education problems.
• Ernesto in Cul De Sac looks like a pint-size Latino John Hodgman, and it carries over into the way he talks.
• The Brilliant Mind Of Edison Lee is about a six-year-old who fancies himself a scientist. Of course it plays this trope straight. Sometimes it reads like they're trying, and failing, to recapture the popularity of Calvin And Hobbes.

Other

• Jack Chick occasionally slips into this in his gospel tracts, with small children (surely no more than eight years old) knowing waaaaay too much about the Bible. And actively preaching. It is true that kids from religious homes will probably have some Biblical knowledge, but they're much more likely to say something along the lines of "Jesus is my friend!" in everyday conversation than "The substitutional atonement doctrine explains why the incarnation of Christ was necessary for mankind's redemption."

Video Games

• Pearl of Ace Attorney is surprisingly deductive, logical, and aware of the consequences of many things legal and moral, often seen giving advice and added perspective to Phoenix Wright when in a serious moment. Sure, she is the coddled daughter of a Chessmaster, and a spiritual prodigy, but the girl is only nine. Then again, her favorite TV show is Kid's Masterpiece Theatre.
  • In Japanese, she also has an impressive grasp on the complicated system of honorific/humble language, which, if my professors aren't lying to me, usually has to be explicitly taught to college students as they prepare to enter the work force.
  • The last case in the Phoenix trilogy, however, has as a plot point that while she talks above her grade level, she's not too hot at reading yet. (In the Japanese version, she can't fully understand kanji; not sure how they translated it.)
    • In the English version, she was a poor reader as well, but the phrases in question were in English: Gravely roast -> roast's gravy. It's not exactly the most elegant thing the translators did, but it's not Macekre-level. Gets the job done, I guess.
• Many important characters in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker are around Link's age, which is somewhere around 10-12. Yet, their dialogue barely differs from that of the adult characters. Especially Medli and Tetra are Wise Beyond Their Years, but it's justified for them. Played with in Ocarina of Time with Saria, who speaks very sophisticated from time to time as well. She looks like a child, but is probably much Older Than They Look.
• Played with in Golden Sun: The Lost Age by Eoleo, who thinks like this when you use your Mind Read spell on him... because he's not old enough to speak yet. However, it also gets lampshaded; one of his playmates complains about his "grown-up attitude".

Web Comics

• In Penny Arcade, Tycho's niece, Anna or "Annarchy," not only speaks with almost ludicrous Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, apparently taking after her uncle in that regard, but is advanced enough as to be the standby Professor type in the computer game. There is one strip where she speaks somewhat normally, and is immediately chided for it by her uncle.
  • Also, she beat the original Famicom versions of Final Fantasy 1-3. In Japanese.
    • By contrast, some of Gabe's verbiage can be a tad immature. When Annarchy mentions in a strip that her uncle has forbidden her to play World of Warcraft because the Deeprun Tram is a warren of pedophiles, he responds, "Word.". Of course, some of Gabe's behaviour can be extremely immature, so at least he's consistent.

Web Original

• Whateley Academy is supposed to be a high school for mutants, with most of its students indeed belonging to the right age group because mutations generally manifest during puberty. You wouldn't believe it from listening in to most of their conversations, though. (In some cases it's justified—some of these kids were already highly educated before they arrived and/or have superhuman mental faculties –, but it's too universal a phenomenon to be explained by that alone.)

Western Animation

• Penny from Inspector Gadget used semi-big words like "infiltrate" and such, but that's not too bad. What did stick out, however, was something she said in an episode where MAD was trying to turn metal into gold: "If MAD can turn metal into gold, they'll undermine the world economy!" Wow! For someone who's not even in middle school, she's able to understand a concept that most don't learn—or even understand—until high school! Then again, her uncle is a cyborg and she runs around with a laptop before laptops even existed, and no explanation of why is ever given. Penny might just be really, really smart.
• Hey Arnold! had a kid who said that he wanted a role model "that I can look up to emulate." Seeking a role model, and using a word like "emulate"? Not nearly as bad as Arnold telling a marketing man that he "saturated the market" with too much of his product. How old are these kids? Fourth grade.
• Bart Simpson switches in and out of this trope Depending on the Writer. Lisa, however, is permanently bound to it. Possibly justified, since she's a Child Prodigy.
• This was pretty much the whole gag behind Home Movies.
• One time, okay, one time Randy Beaman said the kid in Animaniacs was a subversion and I said he wasn't he was an aversion and Randy Beaman said I should put him in anyway and I did. 'Kay, bye.
  • All three of the Warners have pulled it at some point, if only for a gag.
• The kids on South Park are ridiculously sophisticated for their age, especially Stan, Kyle, and Cartman. Of course, they pretty much have to be, given that all the adults in town are complete idiots.
• The ten-year-old Green Lantern from Batman Beyond spoke like this. Of course, he was a ten-year-old Green Lantern.
  • He's also the Dalai Lama.
  • Speaking of ten-year-old Green Lanterns, averted in the Justice League Unlimited episode "Kid Stuff", where John Stewart, Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman are turned into kids to save the day after adults are banished from the Earth. Although this would have been a Justified Trope had they done it, it was much more entertaining to see the superheroes acting like kids, rather than just cuter versions of themselves. Except for Batman who adheres to this trope religiously, which gets a Lampshade Hanging. A rather poignant one, at that.

Batman: I stopped being a kid when I was nine years old.

• Try watching any cartoon that has been dubbed to Latin American Spanish and pay attention to the dialogue. Let's just say that when a little kid starts talking fancy, with neutral accent and using baroque words the rest of the world assume he/she saw way too much TV. And there starts the mocking.
• The kids in Recess with Gretchen being the biggest example.
• Jimmy Neutron, anyone? Admittedly he turns it down a lot of the time, but sometimes he just can't help it.
• Dexter.
• Tom on The Amazing Chan and The Chan Clan.

Real Life

• Children tend to speak using the same vocabulary as the people around them. If they're around people who use scientific terms on a regular basis, there's a good chance they will, too.
• Some kids happen to speak that way at times, but usually when their parents tell them to do so, or when they're true prodigies. It's still extremely creepy.
• The Little Professor speech is consider a sign of Asperger's. Even Dr. Hans Asperger, who identified the condition, would playfully refer to his patients who had it, as "the little professors".
• Seems to happen a lot with child actors:
  • Dakota Fanning talked like she was forty right from her I Am Sam days. She learned to read at the age of two.
  • In a DVD extra from the second Harry Potter film, 12-year-old Daniel Radcliffe tells us in an apparently unscripted talking head bit that "Basically, in the first film Harry is very reactive to everything around him and in the second film he's very proactive."
  • Barry Sonnenfeld once recounted a story about an experience he had with Christina Ricci while filming the first Addams Family movie: He told her he wanted her to play Wednesday "sadder", to which she replied, "Wednesday can't be sad. She doesn't have any emotions." Sonnenfeld had to search around for "morose" to find an adjective Ricci (then 11) would accept. He later commented that working with Ricci had to have been what it was like to work with Jodie Foster as a child.
• Harry S. Truman talked like this as a kid.