All 10 Uses of
pretentious
in
Arrowsmith
- 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.†
Chpt 3
- 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.†
Chpt 8
- …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.†
Chpt 11
- 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.†
Chpt 16
- God give me a quiet and relentless anger against all pretense and all pretentious work and all work left slack and unfinished.†
Chpt 26
- 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.†
Chpt 26
- 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.†
Chpt 28
- I am sorry you are not to have the fun of being pretentious and successful--for a while.
Chpt 29 *pretentious = attempting to act more impressive than is deserved
- 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.†
Chpt 30
- But amid the pretentious splendor which Roger Lanyon had accumulated, Joyce was not tedious.†
Chpt 37
Definition:
-
(pretentious) acting more impressive than is deserved