I've been called the Sophist for a long time for two reasons:

It started way back in my first honors classes, when they would throw me in to debates cold to argue for the side I was adamantly opposed to. I would always still get into it because I love debating in person so much that I play the devil's advocate, and I could come up with the oddest stuff to just run circles around a much better prepared opponent, and always got them flustered enough that i could bamboozle the crowd and judges even when (as was often the case in the cold debates) I felt the other person's actual arguments were a million times stronger and more correct. It is kind of scary, but people always tell me I HAVE to be a lawyer (shudders).


And also because my specialty was writing persuasion/argumentation speeches and essays using the exact same quotes and figures from the exact same sources to prove and argue two completely opposing positions, and being able to do it in a manner that my professors and study groups were wholly at a loss as to which viewpoint was the one I really supported.