guff

Notes on Being a Know-It-All

Again today someone thanked me for providing a tidbit of information about something or other of little consequence, to me in any case, and then suggested I must know everything. To put aside modesty for a moment, I admit I do tend to know a lot, at least on those subjects I actually do know something about. That, and often on topics of interest I may have browsed once in an encyclopedia. But someone who knows everything? Me? Perhaps. Notably, knowing everything automatically makes you a Know-it-all, a title I usually avoid due to the negative connotations it brings with it; but for the benefit of getting the point across here, it will do.

Being a Know-it-all is not without its appeal. It can gain respect from those who do not know it all, which for a Know-it-all is often the point. True, it can create enemies of those either envious or suspicious of your knowledge, but what doesn’t nowadays? I think anyone can be a Know-it-all, given the right set of tools. Sadly, those need to be a part of you when you come into the world. It can also be quite hard to pull off being a Know-it-all, and more so if you’re not one by nature. It requires constant effort — you can’t take a week off for a holiday.

Also, I am enough of a Know-it-all to know this: It’s all a lie.

Being a Know-It-All does not mean knowing it all. Far from it. It’s knowing how to provide information to others. How one responds — especially when uncertain of the actual answer — is more responsible in relaying you’re a Know-it-all than the knowledge you’ve passed on will ever be. It also relies heavily on knowing how to get at information. Know-it-alls are adept at Dewey decimal and maneuvering through a documentation’s index and traipsing through files. A Know-it-all on the Web knows search engines at least as well as the developers do. Ask a Know-it-all something on a topic of your choosing, just about any topic, and he or she can dig up enough data and phrase their reply in such a manner that you’ll be in the dark to the fact they never heard of it previous to your question.

One often untouched feature of being a Know-it-all is how it can improve the lives of those who actually do know everything in their respective field of work or study. A Know-it-all, by way of needing the attention of others, enjoys stepping in to answer queries where an expert may have been required. In this way, Know-it-alls can act as a buffer for the real smart people, allowing them to avoid the constant annoyance of the world around them, get on with what their about, and pick and choose only those things they decide they want to be bothered by. They should try to make more use of Know-it-alls, and find ways to encourage them.

Finally, I believe one bad aspect of being a Know-it-all, other than the hours, are those times when you actually do know something. When you find a situation come upon you and it happens to be in an area you’ve spent a large percentage of your life on, you’ve now become the expert, and caught deciding whether to put on your Know-it-all persona, or the one that actually does know the subject matter at hand. That’s quite a dilemma for a Know-it-all, I can tell you that.