Speaking of childhood training, a lot of students in high schools across the U.S. are rewarded for pompous speech in their writing. I cannot imagine why. Many of those sentences are so wordy, syntactically tangled, and vocabulary-challenged that they don't even make sense. Every once in a while, I will have the student come to office hours and try to explain the worst sentences--or, more difficult still, actually parse them for me. These students very often cannot disentangle the mess and don't know the meaning of the big, impressive words they use.
I was recently at a conference attended by quite a few high school teachers. I should have asked about this phenomenon.
