How To Use Pretension In A Sentence

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

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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
Later mythologizers would try to legitimize the family's regal pretensions by claiming descent from the Banquo of Shakespeare's "Macbeth"—which was nonsense, as Mr. Massie explains: The name "Stewart," as it was rendered before Mary Stuart adopted the French spelling, indicated the family's original status, as stewards of the royal revenues. Servants To Masters
A conscientious attempt has been made to trace the life and career of Yvette Guilbert from her childhood in the Parisian gutter (or not far removed from it), through her glittering supremacy as a fin de siÃ¨cle diseuse, on into the years of waning prestige and cultural pretension, and so to her last days, harassed and impecunious, in the bleak Provence of 1944. This Was Not Yvette
This surprises me for I've always thought of him as an exacting craftsman and, therefore, leery of artistic pretensions.
He had then made the time-worn accusation that the pretensions of the courts reduced the kingdom to an aristocracy of magistrates.
However, an ivory plaque of Christ blessing Otto II and Theophano shows how the match could dignify Saxon imperial pretensions.
Without such a justification, is there a danger of having the work dismissed as pretension or posturing or, at worse, accused of naiveté?
The missing apostrophe from area's you might put down to a typing error; the missing hyphens from well-maintained, 5th-floor, and ready-to-move-into you might ascribe to the pandemic mishandling of those simple punctuation marks; the misrelated clause at the beginning and the dubiously related clause at the end are not so easily shrugged off: they are the faults of pretension rather than ignorance, and the illiteracy of pretentiousness is the vulgarest and most reprehensible. VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol XIII No 2
There were no intellectual points to be scored, no intense undergraduate conversations, no pretensions.
Like Aerosmith at its best, Buckcherry has both the rhythmic sway to go with its rock-and-roll stomp and the raw charisma to get away with its period pretensions.
Even TV cartoons with artistic pretensions tend to be about as low as low art can get.
Turns out only one of his two associates is from Portland, and he has the hard-edged glitter in his eyes and cuff-links that I associate with men of rank, or at least of pretension to such. For Adams, photo op becomes knock op (Jack Bog's Blog)
Its very simplicity serves as a correction to the elaborate artifice and pretension - most of it hollow - that pervade current dance-making.
A young woman convinced Charteris belongs to her, and despite pretensions to "advanced views," she has her way as only certain well-heeled women of her time do, throwing fits. Regina Weinreich: Titillation and Tantrums: Shaw's Philanderer at the Pearl Theater
While a movie like The Scorpion King has mythic pretensions, it merely parades lifeless mythic cliches that lack the timeless gravity of moral tales.
We passed on it in favor of a steakhouse down the street with one thing on the menu, filet mignon in four sizes, he making no pretensions of being an epicure.
Both had an undeserved reputation for pretension and a sharp sense of humour that went over the heads of many of their detractors.
Ann's suggestion that the use of "gainsaid" in Brennan's opinion was "sheer pretension, a modern person's idea of how to sound like you came from the 19th century," has a little pretense to it as well. "It cannot be gainsaid..."
The industry is so ripe with foolishness, pretensions and self-loathing that nothing can be said or done to make it appear even more foolish.
Welsh language I think I may lay some pretensions; were I not well acquainted with it, I should not have carried off the prize at various eisteddfodau, as I have done. Wild Wales : Its People, Language and Scenery
Everybody sees through their warp, through their bias, through their pretensions, through their needs all of that.
For all its pretensions and elitism, the art movie industry - the producers, the distributors, the cinemas - did at least ensure a diverse and plentiful supply of world cinema.
Crowded around tables the size of Frisbees, people pose in a pageant of pretension.
It is the excessive pretension for Eurasianism, using it as "the" Russian identity both nationally and regionally, which is what turns it into a de facto global ideology and counterposes it to Atlanticism. Eurasianism and Atlanticism: enemies or allies?
We are so covered with layers and layers of refinement, of social polish, of airs and graces and civilization and pretensions that the human in us almost ceases to exist.
I won't sink into pretension and argue that it is an art form, but I will say that it's far more than an omnium-gatherum of detritus, as its mocking gallery insists it is. Adam Hanft: Irving Penn, Twitter, and the Everydayness of Life
He has a moral compass, however wonky, and is a great pricker of adult pretensions. Times, Sunday Times
Commons, that "their remonstrance was more like a denunciation of war, than an address of dutiful subjects, and that their pretension to inquire into state affairs was a plenipotence to which none of their ancestors, even during the weakest reigns, had ever dared to aspire. A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon For the Use of Schools and Colleges
United's championship pretensions took a dent when they were beaten 5-1 by Liverpool.
He has/makes no pretensions to being an expert on the subject.
The religion which has taught men truth -- above all things, _truth_ -- which teaches utter horror of a lie, which insists on the bare, bald reality in heaven and earth, which has taught men hatred of the false as the meanest and most unmanly thing existing -- this religion took its rise in claptrap miracles, was puffed into popularity by boasting pretensions, was born in trickery and nurtured by legerdemain! Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 Devoted to Literature and National Policy
It was the supreme anthem of renunciation, of scorn, of derision at the pretensions of the ungifted and the insensitive.
His intellectual pretensions are all sham.
Jesus was a man, of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, and an enthusiastic mind, who set out without pretensions of divinity, ended in believing them, and was punished capitally for sedition by being gibbeted according to the Roman law. Global Democracy and the Rise of the King of Darkness
That said, I'm planting the Cone of Smugness firmly on my head to point out two recent spelling errors -- bathyscape should be bathyscaphe, and back when you were talking about randonneurs, you misspelled pretension with a t in the middle instead of an s. Worst of Craigslist: Delicious, Savory Bike Love
And let men make ever such strong pretensions to knowledge, from their far-fetched and dear-bought experience, cannot a penetrating spirit learn as much from the passions of a Sir Hargrave Pollexfen in England, as it could from a man of the same or the like ill qualities, in Spain, in Sir Charles Grandison
The front seatbelts are adjustable and fitted with pretensioners and force limiting mechanism.
Robert Eccleshall has fewer pretensions than Ted Honderich but his book is much more coherent.
Can you tell me what more any natural son to the late Earl Rivers could have the pretension to expect? MAN'S LOVING FAMILY
So easily can the line between modish chic and outright pretension be crossed when the decor is not chosen with the deftest of touch in bars such as this.
Another teen romance with pretensions of saying something more.
This much may be expected of a state with pretensions to sovereignty and legitimacy, and certainly this much may be expected of good neighbours.
It is quite complex and difficult to simulate bolt pretension accurately in the analysis of bolt joint by finite element method.
On his way to Damascus, Maritain was knocked off his despairing pretensions and turned toward sainthood.
The sheer oddness of the way the place functioned, the incongruity between functioning and pretension.
While it wasn't a pretension, just a habit, it irritated him because he was certain her meteorology was unsound. LOOKING FOR THE SPARK
This is a place with no need for pretension, shameless self-promotion or global snobbery.
With its suffocating pretensions and frequent idiocies, television has always cried out for sardonic mockery.
Rather we read Mark because he is an expert at exposing sham, pretension, and hypocrisy, and because he was the greatest American humorist of the 19th century.
He leaves listeners entirely convinced that his 18-year-old striker is morphing into a multi-faceted performer possessing the prowess, but none of the pretensions, synonymous with the game's most coveted wunderkinds.
The pretensions of Cade and Pistol are exposed by representatives of legitimacy.
Readers may find the pretension and arrogance of her style irritating.
– Such is the foundation on which stands his pretensions to disinterestedness, which were only assumed to conceal the deep-laid projects of his ambition, and to deceive those whom he afterwards meant to enslave. Moniteur/Morning Chronicle
He has/makes no pretensions to being an expert on the subject.
Describing a scene in "Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley" (1918) where two characters are mocked for their pretensions to individuality and refinement, Mr. Shannon puts in a good word for "the Irish art of begrudgery," the much-noted Celtic practice of ridiculing anyone in the community who had the temerity to stand out. Visiting Cagney's Neighborhood
Intelligence's pretension to being objective is a hoax because those parts of it that do not reconfirm the power structure's interests and predetermined policies are ignored and discarded.
Conservative status pretension might work differently, but status pretension is status pretension, and as a general matter, because the vast majority of educationally-based upwardly mobile classes in this country is liberal, it applies well to liberal habits. Matthew Yglesias » The Brie Factor
Her wide-eyed innocence soon exposes the pretensions of the art world.
Instead, sticking to their anti-formula of catchy singalong anthems, infectious enthusiasm and a resolute lack of pretension, they've not only survived but thrived, routinely selling out major concert-hall tours.
Jarmusch directs with a deadpan tone throughout, always at a slow, sometimes funereal pace, his humour full of whimsy and subversion but prone to moments of idiosyncrasy that slip towards pretension.
The prospector is a man of small pretensions, of peaceful disposition, indomitable will, boundless perseverance, remarkable endurance, undoubted courage, irrepressible hopefulness, and unlimited hospitality He is the friend of every man till he has evidence that the man is his enemy, and he is the most respected man in the mining regions of the West. The California Birthday Book
The football World Cup is gradually overtaking the Olympic Games as the leading sporting festival because it has never had much pretension to virtue.
Meanwhile, his twin brother Donald is writing his own screenplay, a shameless potboiler that has no pretensions of art, but every intention of wealth.
While it wasn't a pretension, just a habit, it irritated him because he was certain her meteorology was unsound. LOOKING FOR THE SPARK
Humor likes to explode pretension, pedantry, dignity, pomposity; we get a feeling of joy whenever those who are superior come a cropper, which is increased when we feel that they have no right to their places. The Foundations of Personality
She ridicules his pretensions and by extension the literary territory of the primitive exotic, pronouncing it all ‘pure artistic bosh and conceit’.
Ever since the late 1960s, there has been a superfluity of vehicles sold in the U.S. that have had pretensions of off-roadability. Jalopnik
It is wonderful that any man could have, in the space of eight days, written, with his own hand, so fiery an invective, so compelling of the attention of any reader, so completely annihilative of his antagonist's pretensions and contentions, so convincingly establishing his own: to have made of it, in the course of composition so rapid and totally unrevised, such a jewel of Andivius Hedulio Adventures of a Roman Nobleman in the Days of the Empire
He has staked out his claim for being a great critic through portentousness, pomposity, and extravagant pretension, and, from all appearances, seems to have achieved it.
But subsequent reading of the play clarifies little and amounts to less, merely confirming his pretensions and misguidedness.
In his strait, the clerk bethought him of two or three words of Latin he used in making out the town's deeds; and no sooner had he tried the strange object before him with these, than out came such a blatter of Latin, that Rab Tull -- who with all his pretensions was no great scholar -- was overwhelmed. The Mysteries of All Nations Rise and Progress of Superstition, Laws Against and Trials of Witches, Ancient and Modern Delusions Together With Strange Customs, Fables, and Tales
He had the ethical bee in his bonnet and was a reformer of no mean pretension, though his work had been mainly in the line of contributions to the heavier reviews and quarterlies and to the publication over his name of brightly, cleverly written books on the working classes and the slum-dwellers. The Benefit of the Doubt
We have learned to distrust the responses of their timeserving oracles, and to laugh at the ignorant pretensions of their literary artisans. The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 78, April, 1864
Thanks to Gervais' inspired – and, yes, occasionally scathing – stewardship, the Globes steered clear of the pretension and self-worship to which awards shows so often fall victim. Which Of His Golden Globes Jokes Crossed The Line?
anti-codifiability" thesis about ethics, directed against the prevailing pretensions of normative theory. Virtue Ethics
Despite his aversion to literary pretension, Parks has translated the Italian writer, who is more surely a purveyor of bosh than Rushdie ever will be.
She saw Clint as an aging pretty-boy, a gifted entertainer with overblown artistic pretensions.
My young floricultural friend, JOE of Birmingham, who knows a bit about fruits as well as concerning orchids, let me tell you, -- JOE, I say, laughs their preposterous pretensions to scorn. Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, June 20, 1891
Even if you have a problem with all of the arty pretension, there's some great drums at the very least.
When Johnson refers to his mind as ‘Summus… celsa dominator [in] arce ’, the elaborate periphrasis mockingly dramatizes the blustery ‘empty force’ of his mind's pretensions.
Walk in with a pretension in your heart or a lift to your snoot and he would expertly deflate you.
The peasant and market images, for example, render boorish figures (low subjects) in large scale, and classicizing poses (high form) in a manner designed to make viewers perceive their own vices and pretensions.
But for men, on this principle, to betitle themselves that they are the only men to rule kingdoms, govern nations, and give laws to people, and determine of property and liberty and everything else, upon such a pretension as this is: truly they had need to give clear manifestations of Gods presence with them before wise men will receive or submit to their conclusions! At the Opening of Parliament Under the Protectorate
The party had merely added a veneer of justification by using its revolutionary pretensions to justify its authoritarian methods.
Given the Forum's multicultural pretensions, it is a cruel irony that the Tibetan monks were swiftly banished from the beanfeast.
Until then, only workmen sported tans: anybody with pretensions cultivated a pallor.
The filmmaking duo are being cool about coolness, cynical about cynicism, and critical of pretensions.
This was a band of the Midwest, no attitude, no pretension and always able to laugh at themselves.
Englander finds comedy in their pretensions, their folly, their finickiness over styles and shades, but he also treats them tenderly. The Times Literary Supplement
He started on a downbeat note, reminding us of the Establishment's crawling opening party to launch the channel, which was full of snobbery and intellectual pretension.
Spam has retained some popularity in various parts of the world, although regarded with disfavour by those who eschew processed foods or have pretensions to gourmet status.
Spam has retained some popularity in various parts of the world, although regarded with disfavour by those who eschew processed foods or have pretensions to gourmet status.
Their behaviour and pretensions were overblown but they put out a good deal of material that retains vitality more than 30 years later.
Its central story is atmospheric and makes good use of non-linear storytelling without stepping over the line into pretension.
It is quite complex and difficult to simulate bolt pretension accurately in the analysis of bolt joint by finite element method.
In February 1992, Rabbi Shach, himself an eminent Rabbi, branded the Lubavitcher Rebbe as a heretic, who harboured messianic pretensions.
The colorizers, to their credit, have few pretensions.
In Rupert Brooke the inspiration of the call obliterated the last trace of dilettante youth's pretensions, and he encountered darkness like a bride, and greeted the unseen death not with a cheer as a peril to be boldly faced, but as a great consummation, the supreme safety. Recent Developments in European Thought
Secrets, lies, scandals, corruption, bribery and pretensions have made a laughing stock of Indian cricket.
The street had apparently at one time been one of some pretensions, but had now fallen upon evil days and become the abode of a number of petty tradesmen, such as cobblers, sellers of fruit and cheap drinks, dealers in second-hand goods of every description, and riffraff generally. Two Gallant Sons of Devon A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess
Conrad condemned the abuses of the Belgians, and he condemned a little bit of the excesses and pretensions of the English, but he saw no alternative to colonialism.
The city has unrealistic pretensions to world-class status.
The colorizers, to their credit, have few pretensions.
The Seven series Forensic Investigators is much better, locally made and far more gripping than the pretensions of a couple of would be Pommy Poirots.
Volunteers, on the other hand, are obviously not doing this in the name of any kind of mulish pretension: they simply love the music and feel driven to play it.
Located in the heart of West Palm Beach, it's a moneyed, up-market environment, big on designer flash and not short on pose and pretension.
We are so covered with layers and layers of refinement, of social polish, of airs and graces and civilization and pretensions that the human in us almost ceases to exist.
The question of noble pretension to property, privilege, and power thus emerges as the underlying problem of the old order.
It had, of course, no truth in it whatsoever, and I more than once confessed publicly that it was only a jocosity … Scarcely a month goes by that I do not find the substance of it reprinted, not as foolishness but as fact, and not only in newspapers but in official documents and other works of the highest pretensions. August « 2008 « Isegoria
His ideological pretensions, which justified the mass murder of political opponents, had acquired religious overtones.
The pretensions and pieties of national leaders merit an outpouring of derision and scorn.
His frames are bare, his narrative is shorn of pretension.
To the garter nobody can have slenderer pretensions; his family is scarce older than his earldom, which is of the youngest. The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford — Volume 2
Michael Armstrong spoofs the pretensions of bourgeois arrivistes, while describing the horrors of child labor and documenting its heroine's mounting inquisitiveness and willingness to intervene.
It was he, too, who laid before Lady Southdown the great advantages which might occur from an intimacy between her family and Miss Crawley, advantages both worldly and spiritual, he said: for Miss Crawley was now quite alone; the monstrous dissipation and alliance of his brother Rawdon had estranged her affections from that reprobate young man; the greedy tyranny and avarice of Mrs. Bute Crawley had caused the old lady to revolt against the exorbitant pretensions of that part of the family; and though he himself had held off all his life from cultivating Miss Crawleys friendship, with perhaps an improper pride, he thought now that every becoming means should be taken, both to save her soul from perdition, and to secure her fortune to himself as the head of the house of Crawley. XXXIII. In Which Miss Crawley’s Relations Are Very Anxious about Her
His writing has more the intensity of an Old Testament prophet pointing out the pretensions of worldly kings.
Buying fresh bread, hot out of the oven, now appears as a luxurious exercise only possible in expensive delis or 24 hour shops with pretensions above their station.
He was of his own age, or a good deal younger, and from his dress and bearing might be of the same rank and calling, having all the air of coxcombry and pretension, which accorded with a handsome, though slight and low figure, and an elegant dress, in part hid by a large purple cloak. The Abbot
Although primarily a critique of the subtle exercise of power, Veblen's book gained popularity as a biting satire of upper-class pretensions.
Alaric had faithfully asserted the just pretensions of the republic to the provinces which were usurped by the Greeks of Constantinople: he modestly required the fair and stipulated recompense of his services; and if he had desisted from the prosecution of his enterprise, he had obeyed, in his retreat, the peremptory, though private, letters of the emperor himself. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
If grilled about it in a focus group, I'd admit that the pretensions and some of the practices of social research make me uneasy.
Gillray so lovingly renders the popinjay, and we laugh so deeply at his pretensions, that the savagery of the social criticism, though devastating, is somewhat mitigated.
Jarmusch directs with a deadpan tone throughout, always at a slow, sometimes funereal pace, his humour full of whimsy and subversion but prone to moments of idiosyncrasy that slip towards pretension.
Brookfield was therefore without pretensions -- it could hardly be called 'a place '-- but, manifolded in dreams past and present, it extended indefinitely before Alice's eyes, and, absorbed by the sad sweetness of retrospection, she lingered while Olive ran through the rosary from the stables and back again, calling to her sister, making the sunlight ring with her light laughter. Muslin
He reveals everything about Stevens through his body language: his stiff, servile "invisibility" when waiting on his masters; his pretensions to grandeur expressed in the wave of a cigar while lording it over the understaff; the pathetic way he touches his dying father -- only with the tip of his fingers -- like a snail too terrified to emerge from his shell. The Flowering Of A Late Bloomer
By the end of that decade, any pretensions to national independence had become thoroughly discredited.
His book is hugely enjoyable as a ramble round class distinctions, pedantries and pretensions, and the different types of snobs. Times, Sunday Times
Gin ever he observes a proud professor, wha has mae than ordinary pretensions to a divine calling, and that reards and prays till the very howlets learn his preambles, that's the man Auld Simmie fixes on to mak a dishclout o '. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Further irritation comes from the increasing pretension to rationality that Alex's nonsense illustrates.
Just as her advancement of Essex in the early 1590s can be seen partly as a move to create a counterbalance to Burghley, so her promotion of Cecil was intended to dent Essex's political pretensions and remind him of her princely authority.
It is very true that Hawthorne had no pretension to pourtray actualities and to cultivate that literal exactitude which is now the fashion. Hawthorne (English Men of Letters Series)
A Reader's Manifesto: Whatever happens, the old American scorn for pretension is bound to reassert itself someday, and dear God, let it be soon. SF Tidbits for 8/29/09
the town still puts forward pretensions as a famous resort
I didn't want to add to the pretension and the snobbery, the clubbiness that I loathe in the wine world.
She had admired and esteemed Mr. Faulkland prodigiously; her vexation was the greater, in finding her expectations disappointed; and could I have been so unjust to the pretensions of another, or so indelicate in regard to myself, as to have overlooked Mr. Faulkland's fault, I knew my mother would be inflexible. Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph
Unless a listener is devoted to this sort of experimentation in music this record will appear to be incomprehensible- and held as an example of ultimate pretension.
High art pretensions caused her to roll her eyes.
Part investigation into the unsolved murder; part elegy for the lost Bliss and for Skyler's own lost childhood; and part corrosively funny exposé of the pretensions of upper-middle-class American suburbia, this captivating novel explores with unexpected sympathy and subtlety the intimate lives of those who dwell in Tabloid Hell. My Sister, My Love by Joyce Carol Oates: Book summary
The dissimilitude is so striking, that the utmost you can here pretend to is a guess, a conjecture, a presumption concerning a similar cause; and how that pretension will be received in the world, I leave you to consider.
More biased to on-road luxury, with no real sporting pretensions and limited off-road capability.
Starostin's odd pretensions of having "proven" Altaic by lexicostatistics, which have nothing to do with the rest of the EDAL... How NOT to reconstruct a protolanguage
The affable MacFadzean flinches from pretension, but says his work is getting more pointed and political, a process he noticed while writing this piece.
It was arrogant pretension of the ancient Greeks to imagine that barbarians were slaves by nature.
Force is the precondition for compelling the majority of people to accept this pretension.
When her proud pretensions are baffled, and her vain towering hopes of an absolute and universal dominion brought to nought, and she appears not to have been so strong and considerable as she would have been thought to be, then to see the nakedness of the land do they come, and it appears ridiculous. Commentary on the Whole Bible Volume IV (Isaiah to Malachi)
It's tacky and seedy, but it's got these pretensions to properness - seaside landladies and all that stuff.
His trust in us was so refreshing and his attitude so free of pretension that I now regret not doing his ironing.
A person's mental health may be unfavourably affected by excessive pretensions.
Drama slides irretrievably into melodrama and leaves this novel, with all its adult pretensions, firmly in the playground.
Intellectual pretension was never one of his vices.
Corbin is the sculptor as metaphysicist, and he pulls this idea off without pretensions. Fore, right!
Today, you have a new generation of books and authors with no literary pretensions.
The arrogant pretension that men must die _secundum artem_ has been adjourned -- _sine die_. Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O
You would suppose that this declaration, so clearly enounced, and that, too, in a place where Mahometanism is perhaps more supreme than in any other part of the empire, would have sufficed to have confirmed the pretensions of the lover. Eothen
Religious institutions claim vast sums of money from their believers, influence many, attempt to impose their dogmatized moral pretensions on others, nations states and terrorists use religious rational for their conduct and however ideal it might be to separate church and state, by hook or by crook, religious institutions are players in the political sweepstakes. Does he or doesn't he, that is the question, history needs to know
It is an unimpressive record for a city with pretensions.
They pretended that the ships were not sufficient, or sufficiently furnished with provisions for a voyage to Europe, and that, therefore, General Howe contemplated the shorter voyage to Sandy Hook or Delaware; and they further pretended that some of the British soldiers had secreted their cartouch-boxes, which were, they said, comprehended in the technical term "arms," and upon such futile and unfounded pretensions they gravely concluded that the convention was broken. The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. From George III. to Victoria
She's a down-to-earth sort of woman with no pretensions.
Rather we read Mark because he is an expert at exposing sham, pretension, and hypocrisy, and because he was the greatest American humorist of the 19th century.
The criterion for success was a polity which detracted least from the pretensions of a sovereign nation to manage its own affairs; reasons for failure can be found largely in the historical burdens carried by all those polities.
I would also march in the streets for my right to argue against its literary pretensions.
Many, such as Fielding's cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, would go on laughing at Richardson, the anxious arriviste, for his ‘low’ pretensions to gentility.
My country and its Coalition Government wish to express their profound gratitude to the United Nations Organization for having, since 1979, rejected the pretensions of the regime installed by a foreign power in our capital which seeks to obtain the seat of Kampuchea in your midst. Cambodia in Modern History: Beauty and Darkness
Under the temporary pressure of pecuniary liabilities, contracted with a view to their immediate liquidation, but remaining unliquidated through a combination of circumstances, I have been under the necessity of assuming a garb from which my natural instincts recoil — I allude to spectacles — and possessing myself of a cognomen, to which I can establish no legitimate pretensions. David Copperfield
He was totally without ostentation or pretension and totally disinterested in wealth, honours or managerial power.
Ellen set aside all pretensions and spoke as honestly as she knew how.
Her wide-eyed innocence soon exposes the pretensions of the art world.
Other exceptional sherpas are given their place in the sun too in a narrative that has no great pretensions to literary skill or scholarship, but is enthusiastic and often wonderfully anecdotal.
It's quite possibly the worst film in the series, and is certainly the most meaningless, despite its shadows of thematic pretensions.
There is no doubt the playwright can turn a beautiful phrase, but By the Bog of Cats is so absorbed in its own desire to be lyrical and mysterious, it fails to notice that it is sinking into the quicksands of pretension.
A person's mental health may be unfavourably affected by excessive pretensions.
The moment this pretension is abandoned the sword will drop from our grasp, and we shall be ready to enter into treaties of amity and commerce mutually beneficial. The Civil War in America
Another reaction to our new scientific powers is what I will call the Malthusian Pretension - that is, the pretension to the ability to predict mankind's limitations.
a change in his lot would have been here, for there seemed to be some pretensions to a title, too, from a barony which was floating about and occasionally moving out of abeyancy! Septimius Felton, or, the Elixir of Life
Under the second article, he discanted largely on the pretension of A Series of Letters in Defence of Divine Revelation
The men talk about him resentfully, sick of his haughty attitude and pretension.
Its central story is atmospheric and makes good use of non-linear storytelling without stepping over the line into pretension.
It is an ambitious work, with inevitable moments of awkwardness and pretension.
It was a kind of pretension, when he didn't actually seem the pretentious sort, despite the silk dressing gown. THE EXECUTION
What a change in his lot would have been here, for there seemed to be some pretensions to a title, too, from a barony which was floating about and occasionally moving out of abeyancy! Septimius Felton, or, The elixir of life
For those with artistic pretensions, he advises on how to stay sane while nurturing creative flow.
How he got money from them to bear the charges of his pretensions (v. 4): They gave him seventy pieces of silver; it is not said what the value of these pieces was; so many shekels are less, and so many talents more, than we can well imagine; therefore it is supposed they were each a pound weight: but they gave this money out of the house of Baal-berith, that is, out of the public treasury, which, out of respect to their idol, they deposited in his temple to be protected by him; or out of the offerings that had been made to that idol, which they hoped would prosper the better in his hands for its having been consecrated to their god. Commentary on the Whole Bible Volume II (Joshua to Esther)
In truth, he was a remote, inaccessible figure to most tribal people, and his traditionalist pretensions were rarely accepted at face value.
He had then made the time-worn accusation that the pretensions of the courts reduced the kingdom to an aristocracy of magistrates.
His formula starts with the best parts of country house hotel cooking - well-sourced raw ingredients and capably prepared, stripped of any pomposity or pretension.
Still less is the notion tenable of any special improbability applying to this particular pretension. Theological Essays and Other Papers — Volume 1
Paul Samuelson once went so far as to argue that economics must surrender its pretensions to science if it cannot assume the economy is "ergodic", which is a fancy way of saying that Fortune's wheel will spin tomorrow much as it did today (and that tomorrow's turn of the wheel is independent of today's). Knowledge Problem
A film less attuned to the reality of how oppression affects human beings would have had the impoverished South African blacks forming some kind of solidarity with their alien brothers, but District 9 has no such pretensions, instead showing that the arrival of the Prawn gives even the poorest, slum-dweller a whole new class of beings, below even them, to exploit for fun and profit. Will Menaker: District 9
There's little that's actorish or phony about this film, few pretensions to what Dunham is attempting. Marshall Fine: HuffPost Review: Tiny Furniture
The pretensions and pieties of national leaders merit an outpouring of derision and scorn.
Only the united Balkan peoples can give a real rebuff to the shameless pretensions of tsarism and European imperialism.
The pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling - Johannes de silentio - disclaims any pretensions to be a philosopher, at least in the fashionable Hegelian sense.

How To Use Pretension In A Sentence

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