Little Professor Dialog: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

[[File:Academic 6985.png|link=Calvin and Hobbes|frame|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]].

 

{{examples}}

== [[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.

 

== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

 

* 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 [http://www.madcoversite.com/mad158_phd.html "How to Rewrite Your Way to a PHD"].

 

== [[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:

* The little girl at the end of ''[[Spider-Man (film)|Spider-Man]] 3'' haggled like a professional adult and managed to con a fully grown man.

* Henry talked like this in ''[[The Good Son]]''.

 

== [[Literature]] ==

* 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.

{{quote|"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." }}

* ''[[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.

 

* Inverted, ironically, in [[Star Trek: The Next Generation|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.

* 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.

* 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 [[Serial Numbers Filed Off|they're trying, and failing, to recapture the popularity of Calvin And Hobbes]].

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

** 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: {{spoiler|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.

* 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]] ==

** Also, she beat the original Famicom versions of ''[[Final Fantasy]] 1-3''. In Japanese.

 

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

* 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.

{{quote|'''Batman:''' [[Orphan's Ordeal|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.

* Tom on ''[[The Amazing Chan and The Chan Clan]]''.

 

 

== [[Real Life]] ==

** [[Dakota Fanning]] talked like she was forty right from her ''[[I Am Sam]]'' days. [[Wise Beyond Their Years|She learned to read at the age of two.]]

** In a DVD extra from the second ''[[Harry Potter (film)|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."

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Youngsters]]

[[Category:Improbable Behavior Tropes]]

[[Category:Dialogue]]

[[Category:Children's Show Tropes]]