What is "pretentious"

Usage examples of "pretentious".

Lefevre was a country dame, a widow, one of these half peasants, with ribbons and bonnets with trimming on them, one of those persons who clipped her words and put on great airs in public, concealing the soul of a pretentious animal beneath a comical and bedizened exterior, just as the country-folks hide their coarse red hands in ecru silk gloves.

Few operatic works are musically more important, and yet less pretentious.

She would grow into an eccentric old lady who peered at the world through a giant quizzing glass, terrifying the pretentious and amusing young children with her hideously magnified eye.

Meanwhile, Reether had been living in a pretentious North Side apartment, which he had acquired at bargain rates because of an unexpired lease.

Kate amused herself by driving over the hills, by watching the inhabitants, by wondering about the lives in the great, pretentious, unhomelike houses with their treeless yards and their closed shutters.

The Eastside scenery got drabber and less pathetically pretentious the further we pushed along the coast.

No, Peter, agents have to be dropped in the dark, and for the time being that puts us into the hands ofthe British, including that pretentious goldbrick we just talked with.

His wife was very different from the highflyers or pretentious noblewomen he usually escorted, and Madame DuBay had responded accordingly.

It was a solid, mature house, dignified but not pretentious, with high, paneled rooms, lofty gables, and intricately molded ceilings, and it stood by the sea.

In spite of all our pretentious psychocultural tests, I doubt if anyone really knows.

He telephoned from a pretentious filling station and then came back, told Smiddy to keep to Route 40.

Donaldson, fly-fishing had always seemed pretentious, but Flaherty soon convinced him otherwise.

I hate with a bitter hatred the names of lentils and haricots--those pretentious cheats of the appetite, those tabulated humbugs, those certificated aridities calling themselves human food!

The meeting in the station became a symbol of stiff, awkward, pretentious Anglicism.

I've always preferred simple food, and have long considered pretentious French cuisine to be one of the major cons of the eighties, and one that should have been passe, if not part of culinary history, by the nineties.