pretentiosity

English

Noun

pretentiosity (uncountable)

1. The quality of being pretentious.
   • 1898 June 10, The Investors’ Review, volume I, number 23, page 819:

     He allowed the schemer with something to vend to humbug him, and he was pounced upon by troops of aristocratic and “society” people, whose impecunious pretentiosity is ever forcing them to hunt down every creature from whom they think money may be wrung.

   • 1925 July 5, Stockton Independent, volume 128, number 155, Stockton, Calif., section two, page 1:

     I would gladly sell first quarter moons / At two bits a bunch like bananas: / That silly incomplete pretentiosity, / That scrawny, flea-bitten planet, / Dogging the steps of the earth, / Rattling after the earth / Like an old can / Tied to the shining car of newly[-]weds.

   • 1935, The New English Weekly: A Review of Public Affairs, Literature and the Arts, page 434:

     I have found some exciting speculations, some estimable aspirations, some enduring fables, much vanity, much pretentiosity—and scarcely a glimmer of truth: […]

   • 1949, Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature, Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, page 638:

     Hatred of baroque pretentiosity and the feeling that the ode-writers aspired too high produced many parodic odes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

   • 1957, Encounter, page 80:

     Yet something of this strange author’s deep concern for our spiritual welfare does manage to penetrate through the blanket of stream-of-consciousness pretentiosity in which he has tried to hide it.

   • 1957 September 22, George F. Tittmann, “Three Golden Rules for Public Speaking”, in The Living Church, page 21:

     […]; eschew all flatulent garrulity, loquaciousness and asinine affectation, pretentiosity, mauvaise honte and artificiality;

   • 1969, Open Persuader, One Incorporated, page 228:

     We've a right to laugh off the scene the bankrupt pretentiosity of the futile self-misnamed Power types, the wielders of absurd violence.

   • 1973 October 10, Punch, page 513:

     You are fully revealed, you piddling little pseudo homuncle, in all your precocious pretentiosity in your comment on the able, highly skilful AND completely convincing film.

   • 2000 May 5, A B Magee, “Hey! Anne!”, in alt.fan.british-accent (Usenet):

     You think *that's* pretentious? You must have awfully low standards of pretentiousnessousnessousnessousness. If you had access to Canadian TV networks, you'd soon learn what pretentiosity was.

   • 2001, mngBINGO, Make Mine Funny, Sleepy House Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, page 28:

     It’s easy to find clowns showing off their talent; they’re so full of it! This pretentiosity.

   • 2003 May 15, spookyjon, “So...”, in alt.music.radiohead (Usenet):

     Pretentiosity readings off the charts.

Synonyms

• pretentiousness