[quote=@BrokenPromise]
While I have a large vocabulary, I tend to hold back on dumping every word I know into a single post. a few colorful words are fine, but expecting a big word to do all the work for you (or multiple big words) can make prose feel antiseptic. 

"Amy had slept in her coat. It was wrinkled and smelled like an hour long workout. "

I would prefer that over...

"Amy's coat was disheveled and fetid."
[/quote]
Yeah using complicated words can totally betray you if you're just using the words to have a vocabulary. 

To further describe why over-use of "big words" is bad, I think your former example sentence is better than the latter primarily because it actually describes how the clothes have the smell, whereas fetid without context can be any smell. I'd use fetid after describing the smell first, but it's not really properly used in the context of a gym setting (how bad can someone actually smell after exercising?). 

I wouldn't go to thesaurus.com and just pick big words out of a pile without reading the definition first, basically. While disheveled and wrinkled mean similar things, they have completely different visual appearances. 

[quote=@NuttsnBolts]
So I'll give an example from darkest dungeon.

"You remember our venerable house, opulent and imperial"

Gotta be my favourite line from the opening narration, but it shows how simplicity in the choice of words will always be better than mountains of fluff.
[/quote]

I love that sentence. A notable thing is they were trying to imitate the writing style of lovecraft (maybe even The Yellow King by Robert W. Chambers) so word usage like OPULENT was probably a direct throwback to Lovecraft. I wouldn't be surprised if that game also used cyclopean, gibbous, or unutterable. 

I didn't really know those words until I read a bit of Lovecraft and Chambers, so I don't know if you'd want to use them in the average sentence though. Nothing sucks more than using a uncommonly used word and someone having to pull out a dictionary.