Both Uses
pretentious
in
Atlas Shrugged
(Auto-generated)
- It was an unpretentious company with an unblemished reputation, the kind of business concern that seldom grows large, but never fails.†
Chpt 1.7 *unpretentious = not attempting to act more impressive than is deservedstandard 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.
- 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, the woman hanger-on of that elite, wearing their shopworn sneer as her answer to the universe, holding impotence as superiority and emptiness as virtue-he, unaware of their hatred, innocently scornful of their†
Chpt 3.6pretentious = attempting to act more impressive than is deserved
Definitions:
-
(1)
(pretentious) acting more impressive than is deserved
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) More rarely, the word form, pretension, can mean to apply tension to something before an event--as when a seat belt is pretensioned so it will be snug prior to use in an accident.