[
UK
/pɹɪtˈɛnʃən/
]
[ US /pɹiˈtɛnʃən/ ]
[ US /pɹiˈtɛnʃən/ ]
NOUN
- a false or unsupportable quality
- the quality of being pretentious (behaving or speaking in such a manner as to create a false appearance of great importance or worth)
-
the advancing of a claim
the town still puts forward pretensions as a famous resort
his pretension to the crown
How To Use pretension In A Sentence
- Even TV cartoons with artistic pretensions tend to be about as low as low art can get.
- The efforts of the Emperor Franz Joseph and the ruling elite to divert attention from their country's increasingly threadbare imperial pretensions furnished Musil with comic material galore.
- It's not exactly simple, but it has no pretensions to art either.
- The play mocks the pretensions of the new middle class.
- He was totally without ostentation or pretension and totally disinterested in wealth, honours or managerial power.
- Yet, more serious is the blunder in his statement "the Finzi-Continis moved out of society altogether and began to cultivate what B's father sees as absurd pretensions to nobility (the name Finzi-Contini in Italian actually suggests 'fake little counts'). Bassani's Father
- Okay, who thinks the food is delicious and a little pretension never hurt anyone?
- Literature is an easy, affordable, multidimensional, cross-curricular way to both educate teens about the world and allow them to learn about themselves and their pretensions in a safe and productive way.
- Preferably female and extremely annoying, with literary pretensions.
- Further, Newton's assumption that Wallace is the sole practitioner of the artful defusion of 'high brow' pretension by 'street slang' is an overstatement -- recall Joyce's exhausting of the entire practice in his "Oxen of the Sun" episode of Ulysses where the whole history of the English language is satirized, equally, from its inception to his contemporary cockney. Omer Rosen: Footnoting David Foster Wallace: Part 1