I think everyone, however educated they are, has to look up a word or phrase occasionally as there are many more words in the English language than those we use every day.
Sometimes I even double-check a word I know well because there's a danger I may be slightly misusing it. I discovered the other day that the phrase "tee hee" is actually read as being a bit sarcastic and dismissive - I would use it as laughing at a groanworthy pun as opposed to "haha" which is something straightforwardly funny. I might not use it like that now, if it will be misread ;)
The things I probably look up most (or ask people what they mean by them) are the three word compound phrases where it's not immediately clear (from the phrase alone) which of the two words go together.
It might become rapidly clear from the context arriving seconds later of course, but I'd rather have the context first to avoid the cognitive pivot-table* (having your brain flipped about a bit) of wondering what exactly is being discussed.
"Building information modelling"
I know what all of these words mean individually but I'm not involved in the topic (construction) where this is a 'thing' so I arrive at this phrase having to make sense of it having not encountered it before. The word 'building' is both a noun and a verb so at first glance I've no idea if we are building something like software to model information or if we are developing a model to handle information about buildings. In the context it was the second option. It is indeed a thing - BIM (Building Information Modelling) is "a process for creating and managing all of the information on a construction project".
Mathematically...
(Building information) modelling - ✔️
Building (information modelling) - ✖️
"Flattened narrative"
I still don't know what this means despite being fully confident about both of the individual words. I saw the phrase in passing in a screenshot of text so I didn't find it again easily after searching. Googling didn't bring up an obvious 'flattened narrative means X' and the use by others didn't match precisely with what I'd seen (entirely possible that people use the phrase in different contexts).
My guess was that it referenced a storyline or character arc that was rather 2-dimensional rather than 3-dimensional. But that doesn't really stack up because if you weren't good at writing a story or character your writing might be described as 'flat' but not 'flattened' which suggests a previous degree of height or dimensionality that you or someone has squashed. Who is flattening narratives and why are they being flattened?
I'm one hundred per cent confident that I will understand the concept when it is explained to me, or I can be bothered to drill into a few of the excerpts Google suggested and infer its meaning from the comprehensible input (where you can work out what something means from its context). The problem is that the pointer (the phrase which points to the probably-very-intelligible concept) is currently beyond my immediate, effort-free understanding. I'm being lazy!
Enterprise
A colleague is the Head of Careers & Enterprise at my university. I know that Enterprise can mean an organisation or an undertaking (not to mention Star Trek ships which do the second one) but I'm not sure how it differentiates itself from 'careers' though. E.g. if I was a student making an appointment what information would be forthcoming if I were to say "actually I'm not interested in Careers as such, what do you have in Enterprise?".
My guess is it has something to do with being self-employed where you're not filling in application forms for a job...?
"Compute"
This one really made me laugh. I saw a Government document where they kept using it and I was convinced it must have been written by someone with English as a second language or where there had been a global 'replace all' error that hadn't been picked up in the proofreading.
Independent Review of the Future of Compute: Final report and recommendations
The verb 'compute' means to do a calculation (or not, as in 'Does Not Compute') but it turned out that in this context it was being used as a noun to refer to computing 'horsepower'. I've been working in a computer science university department for 14 years and had never encountered this usage as a noun. From speaking to a few others it seems to have been around for a while but is reasonably niche.
From the archives: "feet of clay"
When I was at university aged ~20/21 I had a discussion with my then-boyfriend about what the phrase feet of clay might mean as neither of us was certain and this was 1990 where you couldn't just Google it and we didn't have a phrase dictionary on us, or a bible.
It could mean several things couldn't it, if you don't know how it's used?
I thought it might mean having a degree of solidity, sensibleness and groundedness. Boyfriend thought it might mean "can't run very fast". We came up with a few other options and were both quite surprised to discover that it means "character flaw" as in 'a bit disappointing', in that it references an unfinished or cheaply finished sculpture which looks great when you're looking up at it but when you look down at the feet they've not been properly cast. It comes from the book of Daniel in the bible.
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*a pivot-table is where you take data in columns and rows and press a button in Excel etc to summarise the data - it is not the same as Paste Special > Transpose where you convert a column to a row or a row to a column, which is a different sort of pivoting.