I don't think there's an "I'm better than you" attitude in OT or that there ever was; I believe the mindset has always been similar but significantly less malicious. I think it's always been just slightly pretentious; it's a hallmark of a pretentious person to have an expansive vocabulary and misuse it regularly. I find that often in OT, and as a pretentious person myself, I feel like a lesser authority on pretense. 

The explanation is that RPG is full of precocious young folk (also like me) who are just discovering their voices and are looking to be heard in some significant capacity, and they go to OT. There's other kinds of people too, but that's because OT's community is much more loose than Spam's. You can walk in to OT, walk out, and no one will notice, but any fresh face in Spam attracts some kind of attention, good or bad, spoken or unspoken.