[
UK
/pɹɪtˈɛnʃəsnəs/
]
NOUN
- lack of elegance as a consequence of being pompous and puffed up with vanity
- the quality of being pretentious (behaving or speaking in such a manner as to create a false appearance of great importance or worth)
How To Use pretentiousness In A Sentence
- Burns' dialogue has a natural, unforced rhythm that contains a fair number of wry one-liners that compensate for occasional bouts of triteness and pretentiousness.
- There is a lot of pretentiousness and snobbery associated with literature.
- There was no hint of pretentiousness in her manner.
- But at the same time this pretentiousness puts me off.
- If we remove from Rice's statement its pretentiousness, prevarication, illogicality, and (possibly!) shameless opportunism, is there anything left worthy of our attention? John Shore: Anne Rice: 'I Quit Being a Christian!' Yaaaaawn.
- I think of his profound irreverence, his constitutional opposition to any kind of pomposity or pretentiousness and irreverence and an opposition that, as far as I could tell, were part of the fiber of his person. WFMU's Beware of the Blog:
- What was Joyce's excuse for such pretentiousness?
- Though Shakespeare was using the word to lampoon the pretentiousness of Elizabethan pedagogues, there was a joy in the cascade of vowels and consonants that beat anything I had heard on television. Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph
- One of the reasons I think he has come through so much unseduced by his own success and with an unimpaired ability to strip pretentiousness to its drawers is that he has a built-in Geiger counter for sussing out the false.
- It is not surprising to see the mightiest hunter teased because he fears getting too close to a granny whose n|om may track him down and result in an arrow that slices through any pretentiousness he might carry. The Bushman Way of Tracking God