My language is French. I notice that we share some words with English, but these are often considered fancy in one language and not the other. Defenestration is a good exemple, nothing fancy about it in my eyes. But my main language uses the word "fenêtre" (historically the "ê" is the constraction of medieval french "es") for "window", that makes it a very straightforward word. It's as if you were using "unwindowing" and I was finding this word super obscure and fancy.

That being said, we also have in French a (fucking lost) tradition of high brow humour, with the best comedians having a very rich and classy vocabulary and using it for jokes and various horrors. Pierre Desproges (stand up comedy), +eorge Brassens (songs) and François Cavanna (writing) were quite popular, and still are after their death. It makes fancy words and classy rich vocabulary a value that is not necessarily "dull" or "pretentious", but actually quite fun for everyday life jest. Finding a super precise word to use in a comedic description can be quite effective. In English, this is well illustrated by "Tycho's" entries on the Penny Arcade website.

So, yeah, we tend to use them a lot in everyday life. Words are cool. Language is cool. And a rich vocabulary has a reason to be (even outside academia, I mean). It's effective, précise, economical and potentially snappy.