element of showoffishness is present in many uses of rare words. It would be peculiar if the all-too-human desire for status — the motivation behind name-dropping, wearing luxury brands, listening to obscure bands, or checking in to velvet-rope places on Foursquare — didn’t manifest itself in word choice, as wellI'm not saying that this is unfair but it isn't, I think, the whole story.
First of all, those of us with a fondness for words revel not in the length or the obscurity of the words, but their meaning. I'm sure I'm far from alone in delighting in the fact that such a word as 'kephalanomancy' exists, despite the fact that I've no interest whatsoever in divining the future with an ass's head.
Yes, I've come across the occasional fool who'll deliberately use obscure, overlong or otherwise-high-falutin' words in an attempt to impress. This attempt invariably fails, however, because they inevitably get something wrong. For the most part, I feel safe in saying that those of us who constantly strive to expand our vocabularies do so not to impress, but to communicate more easily. English can be an enormously subtle language, and the right word can convey a nuance that a more pedestrian word will simply obliterate. To deliberately avoid a word because it's obscure is just as egregious as replacing a word because it's too common. In either case, one should use the best word, irrespective of frequency in some corpus.
Another point to remember is that once you know a word, it's no longer obscure. If someone uses 'limn' on a daily basis then they not only need to get out more, but they'll consider the word to be an everyday one that everyone understands.
The long word, the obscure word, isn't necessarily wrong. In fact, in most cases, it's the best word for the job.
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