In his earliest work Victor Canning had a bad habit of showing off the size of his vocabulary two or three times in each book by popping in without explanation an obscure word which most readers would be unlikely to know. Here are a few examples.
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He gave this up almost completely in his post-war books, and is quoted in a newspaper interview from 1974 as saying: "The greatest change from the early days of my writing is that I have become less and less prolix. I used to think that the greater the vocabulary, the greater the writer. That’s a hollow sham. I can’t bear pretentiousness in any form, or writing that is vanity and self-indulgence."
Canning also makes rather pleasant fun of his own practice in Matthew Silverman when the bad-tempered editor says to the junior reporter who has delivered a story late: "I suppose you’ll have the teleological impudence to ascribe the origin of your plight to Adam and Eve" Then, a little later, the editor worries "that perhaps he had used teleological, taken from a sententious Times leader that morning, incorrectly." (page 19) The word actually means relating to a goal or cause, and the term teleological argument is usually applied to the argument for the existence of God from the evidence of design in Nature.
I found the word "sciolism" in John Buchan's The Island of Sheep (p. 132 of the first edition, 1936), which suggests that Canning was setting a trend. He would have been greatly tickled to think that John Buchan was copying him.
A modern counterpart is highlighted in the comment made by Angus Stevenson, editor of the Oxford Dictionary of English, on the ostentatious vocabulary of Will Self. "You think he just sits there looking words up and chuckling to himself, thinking 'They'll never know this one.' " (See The Times, Saturday 7 August 2010.)
John Higgins, London, June 2021