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pretentious
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  • her elation was unbounded when she found that Freddy, like all youths educated at cheap, pretentious, and thoroughly inefficient schools, knew a little Latin.   (source)
  • I am sorry you are not to have the fun of being pretentious and successful--for a while.   (source)
    pretentious = attempting to act more impressive than is deserved
  • Robert's voice was not pretentious.   (source)
    pretentious = trying to appear overly impressive
  • "But he could build another house, bigger and more pretentious anywhere on the property," said Mama.†   (source)
  • Gracie Windkloppel Wexler, heir pretender, pretentious heir.†   (source)
  • Having felt belittled by the Count for over thirty years, perhaps he now felt the pleasure of finally putting this pretentious polymath in his place.†   (source)
  • I rolled my eyes at that one: As impressed as I was with the restaurant, calling the water "sparkling" was just too pretentious—like "sparkling" crystal or a "sparkling" diamond.†   (source)
  • Juvenile hyperspace' would just refer to the behavior of juvenile dinosaurs-if you wanted to be as pretentious as possible."†   (source)
  • Virginia—that was a pretentious name for our family, taken from a book, as was Caroline.†   (source)
  • "Epic poetry isn't boring—or pretentious."†   (source)
  • Now there was talk of medical college, which after a literature degree seemed rather pretentious.†   (source)
  • He also had the silly pretension of wearing a long, white powdered wig because he'd heard that the well-to-do in other worlds wore powdered wigs.†   (source)
  • It was founded for pretentious Americans who don't like the company of their own children.†   (source)
  • "I know it's pretentious," she said.†   (source)
  • And Kevin complained of boredom, and of having to be sociable with a steady stream of ignorant pretentious guests who visited the Weylin house.†   (source)
  • Silenus has committed the ultimate act of non-communication," wrote Urban Kapry in the TC'v Review, "by indulging himself in an orgy of pretentious obfuscation."†   (source)
  • , and I do not mean that to be pretentious.†   (source)
  • "The natural dominance of the master again asserted itself without pretension," wrote Van Brunt, "and we once more became his willing and happy pupils."†   (source)
  • Paul had been convinced Gary's reaction had been more than false; he thought it had been pretentiously arty.†   (source)
  • Using French—and then translating—seemed deliciously pretentious.†   (source)
  • "Of course," he said, without arrogance or pretension, "but I always thought that was the way things were, with us.†   (source)
  • Sadly pretentious, with a provincial idea of the alluring in their wistfully upholstered furnishings.†   (source)
  • Abenthy had given me a new piece of sympathy to practice: The Maxim of Variable Heat Transferred to Constant Motion, or something pretentious like that.†   (source)
  • Laferriere seemed less pretentious and voracious to her, but her wise decision was to buy her fill of what she liked best in the secondhand shops, although her husband swore in dismay that it was corpses' clothing.†   (source)
  • The whole business seemed to many of them merely a new and pretentious jargon of weasel concepts.†   (source)
  • After several months of doing day work, she took a steady job in the home of a family of slender means and nervous, pretentious ways.†   (source)
  • Johnnie had as yet seen nothing more pretentious than the starched and ruffled flummeries of a small mountain watering-place.†   (source)
  • Unlike Skardu's handful of tourist resorts, which were hidden away among idyllic landscaped grounds, this clean and inexpensive hotel sat on Skardu's main road without pretension, between Changazi's compound and a PSO gas station, mere feet from the Bedfords rumbling by on their way back to Islamabad.†   (source)
  • Right in the middle of all the pretense, it's an even more pretentious spectacle.†   (source)
  • General Dreedle's views, expressed in less pretentious literary style, pleased ex-P. F.C. Wintergreen and were sped along by him in zealous observance of regulations.†   (source)
  • At Michigan, Cedric didn't live in progressive, tony Ann Arbor, where he thought the people were "snooty and pretentious," but instead in Ypsilanti, a lower middle class, mostly black community about 20 minutes off campus.†   (source)
  • He had borrowed Horace's disguising-room overcoat to keep from freezing, and though Miss Wren didn't seem surprised to see a coat hovering in the air, she was astonished when the invisible boy wearing it said, "I deduced your birds' location from the Tales of the Peculiar, but we first heard of them in your mountaintop menagerie, from a pretentious dog."†   (source)
  • And I don't want to sound all pretentious here—but I do feel this is a pretty significant day in my life.†   (source)
  • Mia had gone to bed early so it was just the two of us finishing some pretentious foreign movie.†   (source)
  • Importantly, she spoke English and despite her wealth and position dressed simply and disliked pretentious display quite as much as did Abigail.†   (source)
  • " It was almost perfect, just a fraction flatter and shakier than Betty Jean's voice had been, the o's and ah's parodies of Betty Jean's pretentious ones.†   (source)
  • If that is pretentious I do not apologize.†   (source)
  • People who go around thinking deep thoughts are usually pretentious, silly things who have no sense of who they are.†   (source)
  • Without his golden toupee and pretentious airs, Toby was a much more agreeable companion.†   (source)
  • How he came by it nobody knew, but he had the most unerring nose for anything pretentious.†   (source)
  • Two matching SUVs are parked in the drive, shining as if their pretentious mechanical lives depend on it.†   (source)
  • Since the smaller States depend on union for their safety and welfare, they should readily renounce a pretension that, if not relinquished, would be fatal to that union.†   (source)
  • A volatile and opinionated woman whose intellect does not match her considerable capacity for rage, Mary Lincoln is short and round, wears her hair parted straight down the middle, and prefers to be called "Madame President," which some believe is pretentious, to say the least.†   (source)
  • He would come to understand that he would never again play the role of stooge to pretentious dogs like Eldulac, Dendybar the Mottled, and the others.†   (source)
  • It was an immaculate and friendly house, grand enough but not pretentious, and it sat inside its white fence, surrounded by its clipped lawn, and roses and catoneasters lapped against its white walls.†   (source)
  • … From the beginning he had been the one marked--by brute situation as much as by any gift of his--to understand them all; and finally--he could say it now without pretentiousness and without a self-deprecatory curl of the lip, for he knew at last, knew he had never hated any of them, the hatred was mere self-defense, the howling of a child not yet ready to put on his destiny like an old wool coat--finally, he knew, he was the one who'd been marked.†   (source)
  • It isn't that they didn't think about these things, and to good effect, but to talk about such things seemed to them pretentious, presumptuous.†   (source)
  • BERENGER: [to JEAN] You're just a pretentious show-off—[Raising his voice:] a pedant!†   (source)
  • I've no pretension to be an expert in police work.†   (source)
  • From, like, hideous romance to pretentious fiction to poetry.   (source)
    pretentious = attempting to act more impressive than is deserved
  • Bit pretentious.   (source)
    pretentious = acting more impressive than is deserved
  • Our arrival at the gates of the Rimbauer mansion (for it is nothing less!) left me breathless. ... She is spectacular! Pretentious! Gorgeous!   (source)
    pretentious = trying to appear impressive
  • This was religion without pretension.   (source)
    pretension = acting more impressive than is deserved
  • The t-shirt said, "Keep Dallas Pretentious. Support Your Own Materialism."
  • The club was a dingy building, three pretentious old dwellings   (source)
    pretentious = trying to appear more impressive than is deserved
  • "A poem about massive battles and boundless love isn't pretentious?"†   (source)
  • She pointed out Raincoat's Pinochle Parlor and Slim Jenkins' pretentious saloon.†   (source)
  • Respectable people do not become painters: only overblown, pretentious, theatrical people.†   (source)
  • The editor felt "Adam's sign" was pretentious.†   (source)
  • She puts on a pretentious tone and waves her hand around in the air.†   (source)
  • The entire Life Drawing class would be viewed as pretentious, and also ludicrous.†   (source)
  • If a restaurant is too pretentious, it might not seat him.†   (source)
  • Basil explained "jelly" as a concoction of a lot of things, but the main ingredient was pretension.†   (source)
  • The pretension just slides right over you if you're hunkered down.†   (source)
  • It sounded so pretentious, this way he was speaking of Jews.†   (source)
  • You live for pretentious metaphors.†   (source)
  • The law offices of Bradley, Porter, and MacKenzie are located in a new and somewhat pretentious red-brick building on King Street West.†   (source)
  • The Colonel blew smoke rings, and Takumi called them "pretentious," while Alaska followed the smoke rings with her fingers, stabbing at them like a kid trying to pop bubbles.†   (source)
  • On the left was a Scylla of lower-priced dishes that could suggest a penny-pinching lack of flair; and on the right was a Charybdis of delicacies that could empty one's pockets while painting one pretentious.†   (source)
  • Normally Simon would have thought that getting yourself tattooed in Sanskrit was kind of pretentious.†   (source)
  • He had a pretentious name.†   (source)
  • There was no pretension here, no hidden meanings in the phrases they spoke, no elaborate plans designed to impress the other.†   (source)
  • He did not employ the heavy-handed rhetoric typical of so much other social reporting, which turned texts into pretentious trash.†   (source)
  • There was no pretension, few attempts to impress, and he seemed to have an intuitive feel for when to stay silent or when to respond.†   (source)
  • He saw them as they had been at their first meeting: he, the man of violent energy and passionate ambition, the man of achievement, lighted by the flame of his success and flung into the midst of those pretentious ashes who called themselves an intellectual elite, the burned out remnants of undigested culture, feeding on the afterglow of the minds of others, offering their denial of the mind as their only claim to distinction, and a craving to control the world as their only lust-she,…†   (source)
  • In the meantime, the Comte de Vergennes, through an emissary, had been letting the government in London know confidentially of his opposition to most of the American claims, and to his ambassador in Philadelphia he had written that France does not feel obliged to "sustain the pretentious ambitions" of the United States concerning either boundaries or fisheries.†   (source)
  • Across the ravine from it, reached by a wooden bridge, stood a pretentious frame edifice, a boarding-house built by the Gloriana mill for the use of its office force and mechanics.†   (source)
  • Pretentious.†   (source)
  • Kessell, ever a spit bucket for the pretentious wizards in Luskan — and everyone else, it seemed — was easy prey for such ambitions.†   (source)
  • He had no taste for sham, tact or pretension, and his credo as a professional soldier was unified and concise: he believed that the young men who took orders from him should be willing to give up their lives for the ideals, aspirations and idiosyncrasies of the old men he took orders from.†   (source)
  • The outside was of an extent to seem fairly pretentious; yet so mean was the construction, so sparing of window and finish, that the building showed itself instantly for what it was—the cheap boarding-house of a mill town.†   (source)
  • What he did record was that thirty-three men and boys were required to tend the grounds, and that he considered the huge Corinthian arch useless, inasmuch as it had "no pretension to direction."†   (source)
  • It was not that I sounded Southern—Southerners are some of the most pretentious people on earth—but that I sounded country, or, since I was at Harvard, "rural."†   (source)
  • I knew, from reading about it, that it was about as Southern as a snowmobile, a pretentious city striving for some kind of ridiculous national or international acclaim, or—as one native son once said—just a lot of really nice conventions.†   (source)
  • I smiled every time I passed a particularly garish neon garden, happy and proud that my people had not given in to the pretension popular among people in town, who called such displays tacky.†   (source)
  • The News educated me and put up with me and I will always appreciate that, just as I appreciated the editors who stood beside me at the Star in the face of such enormous pretension.†   (source)
  • I told him that I had worked hard and taken risks—to my life, my career—to get where I was, but that this business of journalism has a bubble of pretension over it, one that I often found myself pressing against.†   (source)
  • She took a solid position behind the podium, which was placed somewhat pretentiously in the front of the room for the occasion.†   (source)
  • So much of the rest of what I wrote was made up of callow musings, pseudo-gnomic pretentiousness, silly excursions into philosophical seminars where I had no business horning in, that I decisively cut off any chance of their perpetuation, by consigning them, a few years ago, to a spectacular backyard auto-da-fe.†   (source)
  • Perhaps I found it exasperating only because of a certain pretentious virtuosity.†   (source)
  • She opened the door for him, on the top floor of a shabby, pretentious brownstone house.†   (source)
  • Nothing seemed suitable, they were all so elaborate and pretentious, those gorgeous costumes of velvet and silk in the reproductions given of Rubens, Rembrandt and others.†   (source)
  • He was hurled, at eight years, against the torturing paradox of the ungenerousgenerous, the selfish-unselfish, the noble-base, and unable to fathom or define those deep springs of desire in the human spirit that seek public gratification by virtuous pretension, he was made wretched by the conviction of his own sinfulness.†   (source)
  • PRETENTIOUS DICTION.†   (source)
  • He went on, conscious that what he was saying must sound both feeble and pretentious: 'We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some kind of secret organization working against the Party, and that you are involved in it.†   (source)
  • When you are composing in a hurry–when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech–it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style.†   (source)
  • And then, to reconcile me further, there was his polite and friendly manner, which though it seemed to cost him some pains, was all the same quite without pretension; on the contrary, there was something almost touching, imploring in it.†   (source)
  • The house was again as it ought to be--cut off forever from Cecil's pretentious world.†   (source)
  • Shirley appeared to be a large, pretentious country town.†   (source)
  • "Oh, I've no pretension," I could laugh, "to being the only one.†   (source)
  • A self-deceived little woman whispering in corners with a pretentious little man.†   (source)
  • His glasses on their broad pretentious ribbon banged against his stomach.†   (source)
  • But amid the pretentious splendor which Roger Lanyon had accumulated, Joyce was not tedious.†   (source)
  • The less pretension there is in your attire, the better will be the effect, as you are a rich man.†   (source)
  • "No," said Darcy, "I have made no such pretension.†   (source)
  • Externally he is pretentious, booming, noisy, important.†   (source)
  • We may know that it's a base pretension by its having that effect.†   (source)
  • The world is his who can see through its pretension.†   (source)
  • We have seen, however, how idle is that pretension, which I should be sorry to make too much of.†   (source)
  • Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing.†   (source)
  • By and by her attention was arrested by a little stall of cakes and ginger-breads, standing between the more pretentious erections of trestles and canvas.†   (source)
  • And Miss Stark, fashionably outfitted according to the season, her world and her own pretentious taste, was affectedly posed at the wheel, not only for the benefit of Clyde but the public in general.†   (source)
  • Without quite knowing why, my grandmother found in the steeple of Saint-Hilaire that absence of vulgarity, pretension, and meanness which made her love—and deem rich in beneficent influences—nature itself, when the hand of man had not, as did my great-aunt's gardener, trimmed it, and the works of genius.†   (source)
  • I make no such ridiculous pretension.†   (source)
  • A PAINFUL CASE MR. JAMES DUFFY lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious.†   (source)
  • This was the first time that I had ever heard anything about any kind of school or college that was more pretentious than the little coloured school in our town.†   (source)
  • Memories of Evie's wedding had warped her, the starched servants, the yards of uneaten food, the rustle of overdressed women, motor-cars oozing grease on the gravel, a pretentious band.†   (source)
  • Philip, looking across the cemetery crowded on all sides with monuments, some poor and simple, others vulgar, pretentious, and ugly, shuddered.†   (source)
  • She glanced through the fly-specked windows of the most pretentious building in sight, the one place which welcomed strangers and determined their opinion of the charm and luxury of Gopher Prairie—the Minniemashie House.†   (source)
  • The room had a blue wall-paper, and was well, almost pretentiously, furnished, with its round table, its divan, and its bronze clock under a glass shade.†   (source)
  • This particular garden is on a hill opposite the Alhambra; and the villa is as expensive and pretentious as a villa must be if it is to be let furnished by the week to opulent American and English visitors.†   (source)
  • Presently he caught sight, at a distance, of a couple of his ragged Offal Court comrades—one of them the lord high admiral in his late mimic court, the other the first lord of the bedchamber in the same pretentious fiction; and his pride swelled higher than ever.†   (source)
  • They flanked opposite ends of the house and were probably architectural absurdities, redeemed in a measure indeed by not being wholly disengaged nor of a height too pretentious, dating, in their gingerbread antiquity, from a romantic revival that was already a respectable past.†   (source)
  • All he cared for was to have it endurable enough to allow for pretension and congratulation afterward.†   (source)
  • There were many wooden-shuttered windows, and one pretentious window of glass proudly curtained in white.†   (source)
  • The people were dull and pretentious; old ladies with elderly maiden daughters; funny old bachelors with mincing ways; pale-faced, middle-aged clerks with wives, who talked of their married daughters and their sons who were in a very good position in the Colonies.†   (source)
  • This was of rough crude exterior, but the inside was comparatively pretentious and ablaze with lights.†   (source)
  • Clyde was thinking as she talked how different she was from Hortense Briggs or Rita, or any other girl he had ever known—so much more simple and confiding—not in any way mushy as was Rita, or brash or vain or pretentious, as was Hortense, and yet really as pretty and so much sweeter.†   (source)
  • She was, in short, an utter failure, an ignorant, incompetent, pretentious, unwelcome, penniless, useless little snob; and though she did not admit these disqualifications (for nobody ever faces unpleasant truths of this kind until the possibility of a way out dawns on them) she felt their effects too keenly to be satisfied with her position.†   (source)
  • What! no capacity for business, no knowledge of law, no sympathy with art, no pretension to philosophy; only a simple knowledge of the secret that has puzzled all the philosophers, baffled all the lawyers, muddled all the men of business, and ruined most of the artists: the secret of right and wrong.†   (source)
  • It was a characteristics of Chicago then and one not generally shared by other cities, that individual firms of any pretension occupied individual buildings.†   (source)
  • The religious, spiritual side was expressed by the pretentious lying-in-state, by the pomp of flowers and palm fronds—which he knew signified heavenly peace—and also, and more to the point, by the cross between the dead fingers of what had been his grandfather, by the blessings a copy of Thorvaldsen's Christ extended from the head of the coffin, and by two towering candelabra on either side, which on an occasion like this also took on an ecclesiastical character.†   (source)
  • I think you will recollect," he added pretentiously, "when I tell you that it included a performance of the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven."†   (source)
  • There is character in spectacles—the pretentious tortoiseshell, the meek pince-nez of the school teacher, the twisted silver-framed glasses of the old villager.†   (source)
  • Her drawing-room, in a flat on Chelsea embankment, has three windows looking on the river; and the ceiling is not so lofty as it would be in an older house of the same pretension.†   (source)
  • But never had that world, to which he would not have denied theoretical and unbiased recognition, pressed in hard upon him; he had no practical experience of it, and the aversion he felt to such experiences (an aversion based on good taste, an aesthetic aversion, an aversion that came with his pride as a human being—if we can apply such pretentious terms to our thoroughly unpretentious hero) was almost equal to the curiosity they aroused in him.†   (source)
  • "It's so pretentious.'†   (source)
  • God give me a quiet and relentless anger against all pretense and all pretentious work and all work left slack and unfinished.†   (source)
  • Yes, it was during that period when a sense of national honor began to solidify against hierarchical pretension.†   (source)
  • As Holabird's tweeds made Clay Tredgold's smartness seem hard and pretentious, so his dinner revealed Angus Duer's affairs in Chicago as mechanical and joyless and a little anxious.†   (source)
  • He remembered that to Clif Clawson it had been pretentious to use any phrase which was not as colloquial and as smutty as the speech of a truck-driver, and that his own discourse had differed from Clif's largely in that it had been less fantastic and less original.†   (source)
  • And yet, what you call hierarchical pretension is actually nothing less than the idea of unifying mankind under the banner of the Spirit.†   (source)
  • He made a checking list of the favorite neurasthenic fears: agoraphobia, claustrophobia, pyrophobia, anthropophobia, and the rest, ending with what he asserted to be "the most fool, pretentious, witch-doctor term of the whole bloomin' lot," namely, siderodromophobia, the fear of a railway journey.†   (source)
  • It seemed a proof that she was strong and solid and dense, and would live to a great age—longer than might be generally convenient; and this idea was depressing, for it appeared to saddle her with a pretension the more, just when the cultivation of any pretension was inconsistent with her doing right.†   (source)
  • I have seen in his face a far different expression from that which hardens it now while she is so vivaciously accosting him; but then it came of itself: it was not elicited by meretricious arts and calculated manoeuvres; and one had but to accept it — to answer what he asked without pretension, to address him when needful without grimace — and it increased and grew kinder and more genial, and warmed one like a fostering sunbeam.†   (source)
  • He was a short, thick-set man, with coarse, commonplace features, and that swaggering air of pretension which marks a low man who is trying to elbow his way upward in the world.†   (source)
  • Never had that pretension here below which is called the right of kings denied to such a point the right from on high.†   (source)
  • But at last it was the turn of the good old-fashioned dance which has the least of vanity and the most of merriment in it, and Maggie quite forgot her troublous life in a childlike enjoyment of that half-rustic rhythm which seems to banish pretentious etiquette.†   (source)
  • And you see, in this matter we need not grudge a few poorish buildings standing, because we can always build elsewhere; nor need we be anxious as to the breeding of pleasant work in such matters, for there is always room for more and more work in a new building, even without making it pretentious.†   (source)
  • He was remarkable for high pretension, rather than for skill or exploits, and those who knew his character thought the captive in imminent danger when he took his stand, and poised the tomahawk.†   (source)
  • The building fronted north and west, probably four hundred feet each way, and, like most pretentious Eastern structures, was two stories in height, and perfectly quadrangular.†   (source)
  • But I thought Werter himself a more divine being than I had ever beheld or imagined; his character contained no pretension, but it sank deep.†   (source)
  • After going down several turnings, and going through a little gate, Darya Alexandrovna saw standing on rising ground before her a large pretentious-looking red building, almost finished.†   (source)
  • A little upstart, vulgar being, with her Mr. E., and her caro sposo, and her resources, and all her airs of pert pretension and underbred finery.†   (source)
  • If for Isabel she had a fault it was that she was not natural; by which the girl meant, not that she was either affected or pretentious, since from these vulgar vices no woman could have been more exempt, but that her nature had been too much overlaid by custom and her angles too much rubbed away.†   (source)
  • This conviction or this pretension tends to augment their force amazingly, and contributes no less to legalize their measures.†   (source)
  • And to lose her by the interference and the dictation of others, by an impudent old woman and a pretentious fop stepping in with their "authority"!†   (source)
  • She knew what it was all meant to represent, but it was so pretentiously false and unnatural that she first felt ashamed for the actors and then amused at them.†   (source)
  • Near it, chipped at all the corners, was a miniature given him by Emma: her toilette seemed to him pretentious, and her languishing look in the worst possible taste.†   (source)
  • "What surprises me," he began, after a short pause, handing the letter to his mother, but not addressing anyone in particular, "is that he is a business man, a lawyer, and his conversation is pretentious indeed, and yet he writes such an uneducated letter."†   (source)
  • I protest against any one of us here who have known what we have known, and have seen what we have seen, setting up any pretension that puts Amy at a moment's disadvantage, or to the cost of a moment's pain.†   (source)
  • As it came close to the path he was travelling, there was a seduction in its shade, and through the foliage he caught the shining of what appeared a pretentious statue; so he turned aside, and entered the cool retreat.†   (source)
  • CHAPTER VII: TRAFALGAR SQUARE And now again I was busy looking about me, for we were quite clear of Piccadilly Market, and were in a region of elegantly-built much ornamented houses, which I should have called villas if they had been ugly and pretentious, which was very far from being the case.†   (source)
  • They implied that he was insolent, pretentious, and given to that reckless innovation for the sake of noise and show which was the essence of the charlatan.†   (source)
  • The hotel of the provincial town where Nikolay Levin was lying ill was one of those provincial hotels which are constructed on the newest model of modern improvements, with the best intentions of cleanliness, comfort, and even elegance, but owing to the public that patronizes them, are with astounding rapidity transformed into filthy taverns with a pretension of modern improvement that only makes them worse than the old-fashioned, honestly filthy hotels.†   (source)
  • The notary came in pressing his palm-leaf dressing-gown to his breast with his left arm, while with the other hand he raised and quickly put on again his brown velvet cap, pretentiously cocked on the right side, whence looked out the ends of three fair curls drawn from the back of the head, following the line of his bald skull.†   (source)
  • The Miss Guests were much too well-bred to have any of the grimaces and affected tones that belong to pretentious vulgarity; but their stall being next to the one where Maggie sat, it seemed newly obvious to-day that Miss Guest held her chin too high, and that Miss Laura spoke and moved continually with a view to effect.†   (source)
  • During his present short stay, Emma had barely seen him; but just enough to feel that the first meeting was over, and to give her the impression of his not being improved by the mixture of pique and pretension, now spread over his air.†   (source)
  • In fact, if not exactly a believer in the doctrine of the efficiency of the extra good works of saints, he really seemed somehow or other to fancy that his wife had piety and benevolence enough for two—to indulge a shadowy expectation of getting into heaven through her superabundance of qualities to which he made no particular pretension.†   (source)
  • Most of it was rude, and to the last degree rustic; but there was a clock, with a handsome case of dark wood, in a corner, and two or three chairs, with a table and bureau, that had evidently come from some dwelling of more than usual pretension.†   (source)
  • Except this, he has no pretension to nobility, and calls himself a chance count, although the general opinion at Rome is that the count is a man of very high distinction.†   (source)
  • He had never let the fact of her Catholicism trouble him; Catholicism to him was nothing but a name, and to express a mistrust of the form in which her religious feelings had moulded themselves would have seemed to him on his own part a rather pretentious affectation of Protestant zeal.†   (source)
  • Hammond went on: "When you get down to the Thames side you come on the Docks, which are works of the nineteenth century, and are still in use, although not so thronged as they once were, since we discourage centralisation all we can, and we have long ago dropped the pretension to be the market of the world.†   (source)
  • She was not playing at being fluttered, which would have been simply ridiculous; she was doing her best to carry herself as a person so humble that, for her, even embarrassment would have been pretentious; but evidently she had never dreamed of its being in her horoscope to pay a visit, at night-fall, to a friendly single gentleman who lived in theatrical-looking rooms on one of the new Boulevards.†   (source)
  • "Yes," Isabel admitted, "she doesn't sufficiently recognise the existence of knockers; and indeed I'm not sure that she doesn't think them rather a pretentious ornament.†   (source)
  • In the country, people have less pretension to knowledge, and are less of companions, but for that reason they affect one's amour-propre less: one makes less bad blood, and can follow one's own course more quietly."†   (source)
  • She had not had many advantages, poor thing! and it must be admitted there was no pretension about her; her abruptness and unevenness of manner were plainly the result of her secluded and lowly circumstances.†   (source)
  • Much as the girl had been addicted to dress, and favorable as had been her opportunities of seeing some little pretension in that way among the wives of the different commandants, and other ladies of the forts, never before had she beheld a tissue, or tints, to equal those that were now so unexpectedly placed before her eyes.†   (source)
  • But do not measure the importance of this class by their pretension, or imagine that a fop can be the dispenser of honor and shame.†   (source)
  • …on his equals, and also to obscure the limit between his own rank as a general practitioner and that of the physicians, who, in the interest of the profession, felt bound to maintain its various grades,—especially against a man who had not been to either of the English universities and enjoyed the absence of anatomical and bedside study there, but came with a libellous pretension to experience in Edinburgh and Paris, where observation might be abundant indeed, but hardly sound.†   (source)
  • —I had found small edification, mostly, in a critical pretension that had neglected from the first all delimitation of ground and all definition of terms.†   (source)
  • Miss Tilney had a good figure, a pretty face, and a very agreeable countenance; and her air, though it had not all the decided pretension, the resolute stylishness of Miss Thorpe's, had more real elegance.†   (source)
  • There is a long list of fly-blown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the NOT 'UN-' formation out of existence, [Note, below] to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable.†   (source)
  • He saw the years, the brilliant winter days and all the long sweet afternoons which were meant for summery meadows, lost in such brittle pretentiousness.†   (source)
  • But if he had not ripened, yet he was close to earth, he did hate pretentiousness, he did use his hands, and he did seek iron actualities with a curiosity inextinguishable.†   (source)
  • The wire-gang were as healthy and as simple as the west wind; they had no pretentiousness; though they handled electrical equipment they did not, like medics, learn a confusion of scientific terms and pretend to the farmers that they were scientists.†   (source)
  • Among these jests Martin had never beheld one so pungent as this whereby the pretentiousness and fussy unimaginativeness which he had detested in Tubbs should have made him a good manager, while the genius of Gottlieb should have made him a feeble tyrant; the jest that the one thing worse than a too managed and standardized institution should be one that was not managed and standardized at all.†   (source)
  • …of internship, when the thrills of fires and floods and murder became as obvious a routine as bookkeeping, when he had seen the strangely few ways in which mankind can contrive to injure themselves and slaughter one another, when it was merely wearing to have to live up to the pretentiousness of being The Doctor, Martin tried to satisfy and perhaps kill his guilty scientific lust by voluntary scrabbling about the hospital laboratory, correlating the blood counts in pernicious anemia.†   (source)
  • Rubinette was altogether an unpretentious flower.†   (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "un-" in unpretentious means not and reverses the meaning of pretentious. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
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