This did not work for me. Life teaches you that you are smart. While young you are segregated and ranked according to academic ability so its difficult to ignore that sometimes you are much more intelligent than the avg person.
Trying to not be offensive is probably less important than trying to get somebody to like you. At least in your mind that should be your only goal and I think it helps you focus on things you can do fairly easily to build relationships. There are many ways to do this but you should be playing to your strengths. For my first experiences in an office I learned to like sports. You'd be surprised how many relationships with men of any age can be smoothed over by asking if they saw the game from the night before and exchanging a simple opinion. Note - if you pick a team make sure its the local one. Being a sox fan in nyc will not win you friends.
As I dealt with more people of all types I found that how much I personally liked people was not always directly related to their intelligence. Once you hit that point you should start to understand humility.