Meaning of pretentiosity | Babel Free

Definitions

The quality of being pretentious.

uncountable

Examples

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Pretentiosity readings off the charts.”

CEFR level