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Pretentious   Listen
adjective
Pretentious  adj.  Full of pretension; disposed to lay claim to more than is one's; presuming; assuming.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Pretentious" Quotes from Famous Books



... ourselves upon the steps of Mrs. Warren's house—a high, thin, yellow-brick edifice in Great Orme Street, a narrow thoroughfare at the northeast side of the British Museum. Standing as it does near the corner of the street, it commands a view down Howe Street, with its ore pretentious houses. Holmes pointed with a chuckle to one of these, a row of residential flats, which projected so that they could not fail to catch ...
— The Adventure of the Red Circle • Arthur Conan Doyle

... that they feed their nestlings. This method suggests analogy to that of the petrels, which rear their young on fish-oil partly digested after the same fashion. Indeed, all the pigeons are devoted parents. Though the majority build only a very pretentious platform of sticks for the two eggs, they sit very close and feed the young ones untiringly. Some of the pigeons of Australia, indeed, go even further. Not only do they build a much more substantial nest of leafy twigs, but the male bird actually sits throughout the day, such paternal sense of ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo

... its array of elaborate monuments, including those of Pierre and Louis de Breze, of whom the former, the Grand Seneschal of Normandy under Charles VII., fell at Monthery, and was buried here in 1465. More pretentious is the tomb of Louis, his grandson, erected by his wife Diane de Poitiers, with a significant inscription which the curious may be pleased to figure out for themselves. This noble monument is one of those examples ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun

... quick-growing umbrella and pepper-trees which had been planted for shade. Thus all the mass of foliage rose like a mound of gentle slope toward the centre of the town, where Jack saw vaguely the outlines of a rambling bungalow, more spacious if no more pretentious than its neighbors in its architecture. At a cement bridge over the ditch, leading to a broad veranda under the soft illumination of a big, wrought-iron lantern, Mary ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer

... too, of large—even too large—Government buildings, brick-built, pretentious, without beauty of form. But, however ugly in itself a building may be in Trinidad, it is certain, at least after a few years, to look beautiful, because embowered among noble flowering timber trees, like those that fill 'Brunswick Square,' ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... persons cannot help experiencing in the presence of some persons they have never seen before, a half-conscious thrill of repulsion or a dislike colored with dread. A shifting gaze, a noticeably pretentious manner, a marked obsequiousness, a grating voice, a chillness of demeanor, a physical deformity, these, however little they may have to do with a person's genuine qualities, do affect our attitudes toward them. As ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... every surface. On a chair lay a broken toy, one of those elaborate and costly playthings which serve no purpose but to stunt a child's imagination. Though the time was midsummer, not a flower appeared among the pretentious ornaments. The pictures were a strange medley—autotypes of some artistic value hanging side by side with hideous oleographs framed in ponderous gilding. Miss. ——— then violently rang the bell. When the summons had ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing

... very quick, very friendly. But I don't truly think they were interested in the real thing at all—only interested in the words of the wise, and in the unconsidered trifles of the Major Prophets, so to speak. I didn't think it exactly pretentious—but they obviously only cared for people of established reputation. They didn't admire the ideas behind, only the reputations of the people who said the things. They had undoubtedly seen and heard the great people—I confess it amazed me to think how easily ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson

... simple implements, weapons, and ornaments. Following after the trade would be found the smelter with his tools, and, where the conditions were favorable, local manufactories would be set up. But this home industry would not prevent importation of more pretentious articles from abroad. This would account for the rich collections of shields, swords, and golden cups found in Denmark that betray ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... without was of timber and plaster, very solidly built, but in no way pretentious; and the plaster was stamped, in panels, with a kind of comb-pattern in half circles, peculiar, my cousin told me, to that part of the country. Within, it was very pleasant. There was a little passage as we came in, and to right and left lay the Great Chamber (as it was called), ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson

... respectability. No one would have accused Ault of being devoted to any special kind of religious worship; but he was equally tolerant of all religions, and report said was liberal in his wife's church charities. Besides the fact that he owned a somewhat pretentious house in Sixtieth Street, society had ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... to the least pretentious room in the house—not the study proper, which was lofty, book-lined, and leather-furnished, curtained with broad sweeps of crimson damask, but a little shabby place back of it, accessible by a narrow door. ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... board and lodging within her means. She loathed it, everything about it—its faded tawdry splendor, the flashy, egotistical theatrical folk who frequented it, the salaried mediocrities who were "permanent" like herself, the pretentious, badly cooked food; but as she climbed the yellowish marble steps she thought despairingly that even this would be ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart

... noise, more or less musical, afloat and ashore; a pretentious orchestra played third-rate music under the hotel colonnade; melody arose from the lantern-lit lake, with clamourous mandolins and young voices singing; and over all hung the confused murmur of unseen throngs, harmonious, ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers

... of this series, Mr. S. R. Crockett, except for his 'Mad Sir Uchtred of the Hills,' was unknown to me by actual reading. My opinion of that story was not a high one. I thought it, and on a second reading still think it, feebly pretentious. But for some reason or another Mr. Crockett's name has been buzzed about in such a prodigality of praise that it came natural to believe and hope that later work from his pen had shown a quality which the first little brochure had not revealed, ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray

... think of Henley's hospital verses?[19] They were to have been dedicated to me, but Stephen wouldn't allow it—said it would be pretentious. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... geologically equivalent to the Storeton Stone, and of the same nature, has stood very well. Some of the Storeton Stone, if free from clay galls, although very soft when quarried, becomes hardened by exposure, and will stand the weather much better than a harder and more pretentious material. ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various

... a disappointment. Imagine a puffed-up little metropolis of twenty-five thousand souls with all the dignity that half a dozen pretentious hotels and gaudy cafes can give it; not very clean, nor very well laid out, nor very ancient-looking, nor very picturesque. Where was the Carcassonne of the frowning ramparts, of the gem of a Gothic church, and of the romance ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield

... Burnside, for the latter was awaiting the return of the Ninth Corps from Vicksburg, and this did not begin to arrive till long after the raid was over. None of the National army's communications were interrupted, and not a soldier under Rosecrans lost a ration by reason of the pretentious expedition. It ended in a scene that was ridiculous in the extreme. Morgan had pressed into his service as guides, on the last day of his flight, two men who were not even officers of the local militia, ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... Burton shines clearly through his work; cheerful manliness and cheerful godliness. He knows more about human nature than many pretentious diagnosticians; and his gladness in living communicates itself to the reader. Occasionally, as in Spring Fantasies, there is a subtlety easy to miss on a first of careless reading. On the edge of sixty, this poet is doing his best singing and ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... romantic attractions besides its scenery. In the early 'sixties Ben Holladay, one of the founders of the great Overland Stage system that reached from the Pacific Coast to the Missouri River, built a pretentious house at the head of the Bay. Naturally it was occupied by the family only part of the time, and in 1879, a tramp, finding it unoccupied, took up his lodgings therein, and, as a mark of his royal departure, the structure ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... they breathe and which colors them—dyes them in the wool. However skilless, they cannot help reproducing, any more than water poured from an old ink-bottle can help coming out more or less black; although, if sufficiently pretentious, they can monstrously caricature, especially if they begin with the modest time-worn admission that they are more familiar with the marling-spike than with the pen. But even the caricature born of pretentiousness ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan

... always a comb about them to arrange the wigs of their masters, whilst the latter thought it fashionable to comb and arrange their hair in public (see The Pretentious Young Ladies).] ...
— The Bores • Moliere

... actors of Poland are sometimes colloquially called "comedians," as distinguished from their more pretentious brethren of the metropolitan stage in Warsaw. The word, however, does not characterize a player of comedy parts. Indeed, the provincials, usually performing in open air theatres, play every conceivable role, and as in the case of Janina, the heroine of this story, ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont

... membership who was not white enough to show blue veins. The suggestion was readily adopted by those who were not of the favored few, and since that time the society, though possessing a longer and more pretentious name, had been known far and wide as the "Blue Vein Society," and its members ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt

... mansion of the Des Meloises was a tall and rather pretentious edifice overlooking ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... almost in tears, was considering this doubtful reassurance when Bobby suddenly pointed again toward that pretentious estate on the hillside, and cried in quick excitement: "Look-ee, Mag, there's a autermobile a-comin' out from the castle, right now—see? She's a-goin' down the hill toward town. Who'll yer bet it is? Old ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright

... to his aid, for in the pension where he was living, thirty women were stopping. He saw them at all meals, between meals, and all about, idle, gossiping, pretentious, longing for pleasure. "There were learned ladies who left the Saturday Review behind them on the chairs; there were literary ladies, young ladies, beautiful ladies." When he saw their care-free, idle life, with concern he asked himself: "Whom do these parasites and ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg

... the pretentious dogmatism of the Western world came with the discovery of Copernicus and Galileo that the current astronomy was fundamentally wrong. No sun-star or swarm of worlds in the infinite azure could be so precious in ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... not nearly so pretentious an affair as the bar in Lebrun's, but it was of a far higher class. Milligan had even managed to bring in a few bottles of wine, and he had dispensed cheap claret at two dollars a glass when the miners ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand

... instance by fives, or eights, or nines, or twelves, just as well as by tens—all this requires considerable maturity of intellect, and some subtlety of reasoning. Indeed I doubt whether many of the pretentious sciolists, who insist so much on young children giving the rationale of everything, have themselves ever yet made an ultimate analysis of the first step in arithmetical notation. Many of them would open their eyes were you to ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart

... given to an American named Ward, who appears to have been a born soldier. His career was short, but he was engaged in seventy actions and never lost one. So successful was he, that the Pekin authorities conferred on his troops the pretentious title of "Ever-Victorious Army." Unfortunately for that army, it soon lost its able commander, for in September 1862 he was killed when assaulting a city near Ningpo. He was succeeded by an American adventurer named Burgevine, who ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill

... did not like so primitive an order of architecture and built huts entirely out of logs, and displayed as much originality as you would find in more pretentious cities. These were covered over with poles, on which straw and sand were tightly packed, enough so as to make them water-tight. Some would give names to their quarters, marked in large letters above their doors in charcoal, taxing their minds to give ingenious and ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert

... banished reason. It is possible also that the progress toward perfection we are so proud of is only a pretentious imperfection. Duty seems now to be more negative than positive; it means lessening evil rather than actual good; it is a generous discontent, but not happiness; it is an incessant pursuit of an unattainable goal, a noble madness, but not reason; it is homesickness for the ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... utterly unavailable and impracticable, even if as excellent as notoriously prejudicial, but for the really ingenious discovery of the pre-paying stamp system, by a party preferring no title to remuneration, and through which alone, unfortunately, the pretentious project could ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various

... say. The press has been practically unanimous every morning in making fun of the piece and the author. If I enter a reading room I cannot pick up a paper without seeing: "Absurd as 'Hernani'; silly, false, bombastic, pretentious, extravagant and nonsensical as 'Hernani'." If I venture into the corridors of the theatre while the performance is in progress I see spectators issue from their boxes and slam the doors indignantly. Mlle. Mars plays ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo

... had picked up the art, some said, from a Yankee in the army at the close of the war, and certainly no man of his time or territory had such good luck with timepieces. Residing in the little village of Christina (by the pretentious called Christi-anna, and by the crude, with nearer rectitude, called Cristene), Fithian kept a snug little shop full of all manners and forms of clocks, dials, sand-glasses, hour-burning candles, water-clocks, and night tapers. He had amended and improved ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend

... Alick, the more, it must be owned, you learned to despise him. His natural talents were of no use either to himself or others; for his character had degenerated like his face, and become pulpy and pretentious. Even his power of persuasion, which was certainly very surprising, stood in some danger of being lost or neutralised by over-confidence. He lied in an aggressive, brazen manner, like a pert criminal in the dock; and he was so vain of his own cleverness that he could not refrain from boasting, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... futilities. It is as unfinished as ever; the builders' roads still run out and end in mid-field in their old fashion; the various enterprises jumble in the same hopeless contradiction, if anything intensified. Pretentious villas jostle slums, and public-house and tin tabernacle glower at one another across the cat-haunted lot that intervenes. Roper's meadows are now quite frankly a slum; back doors and sculleries gape ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... interesting new departure in cultivation, caught sight first of a now-familiar roadster of aristocratic lines whose appearance thereabouts had become most unwelcome, and shortly thereafter of a less pretentious vehicle, being rapidly drawn by a still more familiar black horse, and occupied by two people whom it gave Stuart no acute pleasure to ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond

... has at best only a half knowledge, or, in a self destructive vanity, deceives himself into thinking that he knows, betrays him always to the injury of both himself and others. An honest Ignorance is a golden vessel, empty, ready to be filled with wealth but a pretentious or arrogant knowledge is a vessel so filled with worthless trash that there is no room for that ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright

... disciple in the school of Bishop Butler, and had learned as a first principle to recognise the limitations of human knowledge, and the unphilosophical folly of trying to round off into finished and pretentious schemes our fragmentary yet certain notices of our own condition and of God's ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... to assist them in regulating their breath. The line is contracted from two of Sophocles's, and Longinus's point is that the extravagance of Cleitarchus is not that of a strong but ill-regulated nature, but the ludicrous straining after grandeur of a writer at once feeble and pretentious. ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus

... to be but two streets on which were built the dwelling houses. These, for the most part, were simple and plain enough, each with its yard, well or ill kept, in front and a garden and chicken yard behind. Only one was a little more pretentious in appearance, but that, too, had attached to it its ...
— Billie Bradley and Her Inheritance - The Queer Homestead at Cherry Corners • Janet D. Wheeler

... considered by the majority of persons to be a dull and uninteresting study, abounding with dry details of small general interest, which, when not pompously pretentious, were, in the other extreme, of trifling insignificance, has, by a better acquaintance with its true position as the handmaid of history, become so popular that most English counties have societies especially devoted to its district claims, and our large cities have ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt

... used to make the soups, and is poured, with an equally nauseating result, over the hard veal, the tough chicken, the "mousey" quails, and the tasteless beef and mutton, which are never roasted, but are baked or stewed in boiling fat—though shamelessly described as "rotis" in the pretentious and mendacious "menu" placed on the dinner-table. The consequence is that the tourist, who has been overfed at home, eats very little, and his health benefits. But in such an hotel the man who lives carefully when at home, and ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... angling after the favor of La Pompadour,—a pretentious knave, as hollow as one of his own mortars. He suspected him of being a spy of hers upon himself. Le Mercier would be only too glad to send La Pompadour red-hot information of such an important secret as that of Caroline, and she would reward ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... Miss Mason's school. She had had her triumphs and conceits; had been accustomed to think herself clever and successful, to hold her head high amongst her schoolmates. Whereas now, if she tried to talk of art or books, she was hotly aware that everything she said was, in John's eyes, pretentious or absurd. He was comparing her with others all the time, with men and women—women especially—in whose presence he felt himself as diffident as she did in his. He was thinking of ladies in velvet dresses and diamonds, who could ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... other—natives on beautiful horses, not needing whip or spur—natives on dromedaries so swift, sure-footed, and strong there was no occasion for fear. Men, and often women and children, on ragged saddle-cloths, others in pretentious boxes, and now and then a person whose wealth and rank were published by the magnificence of the litter in which he was borne, swinging luxuriously between long-stepping dromedaries from ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... the past twenty years a revolution in medical therapy has taken place. Most of the drugs in use today were unknown a quarter of a century ago. Some of the newer drugs can really perform certain of the healing miracles claimed by their pretentious proprietors for the old English ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen

... attracted by a party of Indians who came forth from one of the more pretentious lodges. Among them were a number of the principal warriors including the head chief himself; with them were also several of the Apaches, who seemed, by their dress and bearing, to be men of some rank. They were engaged in a very animated discussion, accompanied with as much gesticulation ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman

... was a restlessness about the court; time was getting on and everything pointed one way. After some discussion with the jury, the foreman of it, a stout, pretentious fellow, rose to his feet and whispered a few hurried words to the coroner. That gentleman wiped his forehead with a silk handkerchief and looked about him. It had been a trying business altogether. He'd be glad of his supper. He got to his feet and ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew

... of it. The convention itself, if it is unfamiliar to us, is what fills our attention, so that we forget to look for the moving spirit behind. And indeed, in the work of the later classicists, there was too often no spirit to look for. The husk alone remained—a finicky pretentious framework, fluttering with the faded rags of ideals long outworn. Every great tradition has its own way of dying; and the classical tradition died of timidity. It grew afraid of the flesh and blood of life; it was too polite to face realities, too elevated to tread ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey

... contracted, and he longed to give the pretentious aristocrat a lesson, but he had the good sense to wait for ...
— The Store Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... other events of the evening; how forms and features were passed in review; how the jewelled, smooth-skinned, doll-like beauties usurped the admiration of the minute, and how the indefinably sympathetic air of less pretentious belles prolonged their magnetic sway to ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton

... Besides the biographical notes appended to selections, there are not a few more pretentious sketches that have been given prominent titles in the body of the books. These have been prepared expressly for this work, either by the editor or by some one fully acquainted with the subject and accustomed to writing for young people. These biographies are written from the point of view ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester

... give rise to works of the highest order of merit. Their dramatic representations were rather gorgeous than tasteful, their attempts at wit little better than buffoonery, their humor mere personal vituperation. Yet even in matters of taste they are not much inferior to the then more pretentious academies of other lands. It was an age of long religious dramas, of tortured rhymes and impossible metres, when strange and new versification imported from France found favor among a people whose silks and linens and rich tapestries were destined to reach a wider circulation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... man his demeanour varied between a shy cordiality and a dignified reserve which was in danger of seeming pretentious. On the homeward part of the walk he made a few discreet inquiries regarding Milvain's literary achievements and prospects, and the frank self-confidence of the replies appeared to interest him. But he expressed no desire to number Jasper among his acquaintances in town, and of his ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing

... pretentious of the Blues triumvirate (including Roquefort and Stilton) is nonetheless by common consent monarch of all other Blues from Argentina to Denmark. In England, indeed, many epicures consider Gorgonzola greater than Stilton, ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown

... with the newspapers screaming their diatribes, arousing the people against him, nagging the authorities into sleepless, frenzied efforts to trap him; with a price upon his head that was large enough to make a man, not too pretentious, rich for life—but in the underworld, until then, the name of the Gray Seal had been one to conjure with, for the underworld had sworn by the unknown master criminal, and had spoken his name with a reverence that was none the less genuine even if pungently ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... choice of permanent locations for building came brick and stone; English architects received orders; and the prevailing revival led by Sir Christopher Wren and his followers dotted the Northern colonies with more pretentious churches, boasting spires not wholly unlike those which were then piercing London skies. With costlier churches of permanent material there came also the English fashion of burial in churchyards and chancel-vaults, and mural tablets and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various

... "and though I be a bit older than you, Mr Gomez, and not quite so pretentious a gentleman, I can like a pretty wench as well's yerself. I've took a fancy to the one wi' the tortoise-shell hair, an' an't goin' to gi'e her up in the slack way ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid

... across the leases. Pleased that she had stopped without an invitation, he was more likable than ever she had seen him, and he made no pretense of concealing the fact that she could be mistress of the most pretentious house in the ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart

... Mediaeval Revival in England"? Because I have a clear title to the use of romantic in one of its commonest acceptations; and, for myself, I prefer the simple dictionary definition, "pertaining to the style of the Christian and popular literature of the Middle Ages," to any of those more pretentious explanations which seek to express the true inwardness of romantic literature by analysing it into its elements, selecting one of these elements as essential, and rejecting all the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... exclusiveness must mark all our matin,es and soir,es; they would fail of the chief element of diversion if we invited everybody. Let us, therefore, make sure of the aesthetic and intellectual, the sympathetic and the genial, and sift out the pretentious and the impure. The rogues, the pretenders, the adventurers who push into the penetralia of our social circles are many, and it is to the exclusion of such that a ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood

... where Chinamen were digging up the streets for gold, almost undermining the few little buildings, and Chinamen also were raising delicious celery, where now stand very handsome houses. Now Main street has many pretentious shops, and pretty residences have been put up almost to the base ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe

... Pretentious gardens are now gayly decorated with glowing masses of pelargoniums and vincas, belts of rich coleuses and fiery alternantheras, patchwork of feverfew and mesembryanthemum, and scroll-work of house leeks, but amid this gay checkering it ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various

... smaller than the one that performed at Schomberg's hotel, had the air more of a family party than of an enlisted band, and, I must confess, seemed rather more respectable than the Zangiacomo musical enterprise. It was less pretentious also, more homely and familiar, so to speak, insomuch that in the intervals when all the performers left the platform one of them went amongst the marble tables collecting offerings of sous and francs in a battered tin receptacle ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad

... depreciation he has submitted to his readers a sample of his own workmanship. He persists in writing "Zobeyda," "Khalifa," "Aziza" (p. 194) and "Kahramana" (p. 199) without the terminal aspirate which, in Arabic if not in Turkish, is a sine qua non (see my Suppl. vol. v. 302). He preserves the pretentious blunder "The Khalif" (p. 193), a word which does not exist in Arabic. He translates (p. 181), although I have taught him to do better, "Hadimu 'I-Lizzati wa Mufarriku 'l-Jama'at," by "Terminator of Delights and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... a pretentious house and decide upon some clearly defined period of architecture, let us say, Georgian (English eighteenth century) we would advise keeping your first floor mainly in that period as to furniture and hangings, ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood

... Sometimes pretentious pictures representing events in public or family history, were embroidered in crewels on sampler linen. The largest and funniest one I have ever seen was the boarding-school climax of glory of Miss ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle

... business, and more recently had taken over from the New York bankers, who were stockholders in the trust company, the handling of most of the public utility securities that were floated in this country. But George Ramsey was not the pretentious pawnbroker in spirit and manner that so often presides over the destinies of American banks, but he was a philosophical financier who understood perfectly the strength and weakness of the system under which he worked, and who, while he wondered at the supine idiocy of the people ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens

... In most pretentious gardens there is a regular mushroom house, and the growing of mushrooms is an easy matter; in others there is no such convenience, and the gardener has to trust to his own ingenuity where and how he is to grow the mushrooms. But so long as he has an abundance ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer

... through the meadow that morning in the hope of finding familiar things, and indulging in old memories. The country roads had been widened and improved, and many of the farm-houses had given way to more or less pretentious "places." Motors whirled past him. The hill that he remembered as a veritable mountain was a mere rise in the straightened road over which a fast car plunged at full speed, covering him with dust and leaving behind a sickening odor. He struck off into a wood-lot; here and in ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... chantant of a more pretentious sort than the Maison Doucieux, but still the peculiar resort of the blousard—for there are cafe chantants of many grades in Paris—may be found in one of the back streets near the Boulevard St. Martin. Some of the cafes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various

... feel a distinct admiration for this particular Ford. The car was heavily loaded—he could gauge the weight by the "feel" of the car as he drove yet it made the grade at twenty-five miles an hour and reached the top without boiling the radiator; which is better than many a more pretentious car could do. ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower

... permanently warped with long sagging. There was a hitch-rail outside the gate, and Bud took the hint and left his horses there. From the wisps of fresh hay strewn along the road, Bud knew that haying had begun at Little Lost. There were at least four cabins and a somewhat pretentious, story-and-a-half log house with vines reaching vainly to the high window sills, and coarse lace curtains. One of these curtains moved slightly, and Bud's sharp eyes detected the movement and knew ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower

... foreign lands. At the feet, a severed circle, some disordered boxes, a pair of large, closed shears pointing toward another commanding form, though obstacles lie between them. Also a crouching form, in part human, with large eyes, and now, on his back a weighty something, facing the less pretentious forms, one of whom is bowed by some new disappointment, being near a fallen wall. Some one in mental suffering, as thorns crown one of the lesser heads, facing a distant city. Some hidden wrongs are ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara

... are presented all acts such as acrobatic acts, animal turns, musical comedies, playlets and other pretentious acts that require deep sets ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page

... upon that. As an illustration his "Life of Washington" may be put in evidence. Probably this work lost something in incisiveness and brilliancy by being postponed till the writer's old age. But whatever this loss, it is impossible for any biography to be less pretentious in style, or less ambitious in proclamation. The only pretension of matter is in the early chapters, in which a more than doubtful genealogy is elaborated, and in which it is thought necessary to Washington's dignity ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner

... did not hear the city clocks, which "clashed and hammered" the midnight hour, as her cab rolled up the tree-lined avenue of the pretentious house of ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.

... the more pretentious private gardens. Their perfume, hanging in the heavy night air, lay on the village, making one forget the over-curtain of stenching mist. Down by the shore of the Nares Sea, this world of the depths had seemed darkly sinister. But in the village now, I felt it less ominous. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various

... this nonchalance, they conspired to hide from themselves the seriousness of that which had passed between them. The grotesque, pretentious little apartment was mysteriously humanised; it was no longer the reception-room of a furnished flat by chance hired for a month; they had ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett

... epilogue, where all the debaters are named and censured, he alone is absolutely ignored. Nay, it is evident that when Jahveh's discourse was written, the poet had no suspicion of the existence of this fourth friend; for at the conclusion of the "fourth friend's" pretentious speech, composed of scraps borrowed from those of the other actors in the drama, Jahveh addressed all present in a form of words which implies that not Elihu but Job was the last speaker, and had only that instant terminated his reply. This fact alone ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon

... after a great deal of hesitation, and a description from the sculptor of what he thought excellently appropriate for such magnificence, they accepted my study. The present Downige, really—though I understand there is another pretentious branch in Hesperia—bullied them into it. He cursed the Beaux-Arts graduate with the most brutal and satisfactory freedom—the tyranny of his money; the crown, you see, ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer

... heavily upholstered. There was a walnut drop-head sewing-machine on which a pink saucer of some black liquid fly-poison stood. There was a "body Brussels" rug on the floor. Lastly, there was an oak sideboard, dusty, pretentious, with its mirror cut into small ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris

... and tables d'hote within the gates, and I had also found that outside, and especially within easy reach from the northern or Fifty-seventh Street gate, were to be found a number of most cleanly and inviting little places, more or less pretentious, and under various names, but all ready, willing, and able to serve one a breakfast, dinner, or luncheon such as would tempt even chronic grumblers to smile, ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch

... confession; because it is not the office of the hat or bonnet to shelter the whole person from sun or rain.] But the brooch and the button must fasten, the chain suspend, the ring bear a device, or they sink into pretentious, vulgar shams. And there must be keeping between these articles and their offices. To use, for instance, a massive golden, or, worse, gilded chain to support a cheap silver watch is to reverse the order ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... fishing was made at the little golf club of our summer town on the veranda where we sit in the evening. Oh, it's just a little place, nothing pretentious: the links are not much good for golf; in fact we don't play much golf there, so far as golf goes, and of course, we don't serve meals at the club, it's not like that—and no, we've nothing to drink there because ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock

... known you may have right here in your home, on your library table. And you may listen to their thoughts without being disturbed by the magpie chatterings of vain and shallow pretenders. You are attracted by the pretentious forms and manners of that life; you think that because a certain class of people, who have nothing else to do, talk a certain jargon, and profess to follow certain teachers—who, nine times out of ten, are charlatans or fools—that ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright

... once or twice, but did not allude to either Clarke or the Lamberts, and Serviss did not care to ask particularly about them. It was better for him not to be concerned further with the girl's singular history. He hated the irregular, the pretentious. His own life, so clear, so well regulated, made her daily performances the more monstrous. The whole had become so foolish in retrospect that he refrained from speaking of ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland

... relief. Love stories appeal, of course, to the sex impulse, humorous stories to laughter, and mystery stories to curiosity. Cynical stories, showing the "pillars of society" in an ignoble light, appeal to the self-assertive impulse of the reader, in that he is led to apply their teaching to pretentious people whom he knows about, and set them down a peg, to his own relative advancement. But here again we have to insist, as under the head of sports and daydreams, that interests of a more objective kind are also gratified by a good work of fiction. A story that runs its logical ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... have experienced things, and may have seen them at such close quarters, that the recording of them may prove of use and value to the thinker. But to write a confession of one's faith cannot but be regarded as a thousand times more pretentious, since it takes for granted that the writer attaches worth, not only to the experiences and investigations of his life, but also to his beliefs. Now, what the nice thinker will require to know, above all else, is the kind of faith which happens to be compatible with natures of the Straussian ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche

... line of heroic and patriotic ancestors, he had not a particle of pretentious pride, but to all men, privates in the ranks as well as officers, so that they were but brave and good soldiers, he always found "time enough for courtesy." He never tried to appropriate another man's laurels, but he possessed ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various

... road leading from Deutscherkirche to Lagerhaus may be seen the ruins of a little cottage. It never was a very pretentious pile, but it has a history. About the middle of the last century it was occupied by one Heinrich Schneider, who was a small farmer—so small a farmer his clothes wouldn't fit him without a good deal of taking-in. But Heinrich ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)

... since had been engaged in mercantile pursuits. At the age of twenty-eight he had married a dashing lady, who was more noted for her fashionable pretensions than for any attractive qualities of the heart. She was now at the head of a very showy establishment, far more pretentious than that over which Mrs. Bangs presided. She knew little about her husband's relations ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.

... Sovereigns, and was composed of only seventeen delegates,—its main function being to suppress all liberal movements in the various German States; like the Congress of Vienna itself. The Diet of Frankfort was pretentious, but practically impotent, and was the laughingstock of Europe. It was full of jealousies and intrigues. It was a mere diplomatic conference. As Austria and Prussia controlled it, things went well enough when these two Powers ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord

... better housed, showed by actions more than words that he felt every pang of his soldiers. Washington's anxiety at this critical period was greatly aggravated by the conspiracy known as "Conway's Cabal," to depose him from the command, and put in his place the pretentious but incapable Gates. This conspiracy was narrowly defeated by the patriotic firmness of the supporters of Washington in Congress, one of whom—William Duer, of New York, an Englishman by birth—had ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann

... preferred. A simple diamond, heart, or oval shape can be made at home with beveled or rounded edges, or if your tools include a turning saw (which is most useful for a variety of purposes) you may try a more pretentious shield. To achieve this, make your pattern as just described and after marking it on a piece of wood from 3/8 to 7/8 inch thick, cut out with the turning saw. It should be held in the vise for this operation. ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham

... overtook the shopman, for the camp commandant hearing of his evil deeds placed a sentry in front of the store and so put it out of bounds. He held out for a couple of days, while his more reasonable if less pretentious rival flourished exceedingly, but a daily loss of L200 is too severe a tax on the pertinacity of a Jew, or indeed of anybody, so the rival tariffs were arranged on similar lines, and the sentry sloped rifle and walked off. The mission workers at De Aar—some excellent people—dwelt ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett

... 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. For instance, elbow-room within doors is to me so delightful that if I were driven to it I would most sacrifice outdoor space to it. Then, of course, there is the ornament, which, as we must all allow, may easily be overdone in mere living ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris

... of work, and is worth a crowd of far more pretentious productions."—News and Courier, ...
— Peter the Priest • Mr Jkai

... Occasionally a reporter, who has been round the police courts to get notes of the night charges, will drop into the theatre on his way to the office, and 'do a par.,' as they call it. Will you believe it possible that the things written of me by these persons—with their pretentious airs of criticism, and their gross ignorance cropping up at every point—have the power to vex and annoy me most terribly? I laugh at the time, but the phrase rankles in my memory all the same. ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black

... giant banian-tree by the chief, who greeted us with simple dignity and led us at once to his house. The most pretentious in the village, it consisted of two rooms, built of redwood boards from California, white-washed, clean, and bare, opening through wide doors upon the broad paepae. This house, the chief insisted, was to be my home while ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... attendant appeared beside the wheel chair, a bottle of medicine and a glass of water in his hands. With that pretentious solicitude of ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman

... how Walpole bought from Mrs. Chevenix, the toy-shop woman, a little house called "Chopp'd Straw Hall" which he converted into the baronial splendors of Strawberry Hill; and how Scott transmitted a mean Tweedside farm, called Clarty Hole, into the less pretentious ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh

... Commandments will be broken, and turkeys will be eaten on Christmas Day. Men will die of disease, violence, famine and old age, and others will be born to take their place. Intellectuals will be pretentious—mules solemnly trying to look like Derby winners. There will be a considerable amount of lying, injustice, and self-righteousness. Dogs will be fairly decent, but some of them will bite. Above all, the human conscience will survive. ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd

... they had found refuge was perched on the mountainside just at one edge of the draw. Rough as the girl had thought it, there was a more pretentious appearance to it than might have been expected. The cabin was of hewn logs mortared with mud, and care had been taken to make it warm. The fireplace was a huge affair that ate fuel voraciously. It was built of stone, which had been gathered ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine

... White House looks like that," Bab said, after half a moment's pause. "I was so afraid it would be pretentious. But it is just big and simple and dignified as our President's home ought to be. It makes me feel so glad to be an American," Barbara ended with a flush. She was afraid the other girls were laughing ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane

... Mercie, Bonnat, Saint-Saens, Massenet, Joncieres in the presence of simple countrymen—or, what is worse still, of inferior artists and critics, of pretentious amateurs—and you will see by what supercilious, incredulous gestures, being incapable of argument, this satisfied ignorance will repel all ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... these that follow. It is Mrs. Eddy writing—after a good long twenty years of pen-practice. Compare also with the alleged Poems already quoted. The prominent characteristic of the Poems is affectation, artificiality; their makeup is a complacent and pretentious outpour of false figures and fine writing, in the sophomoric style. The same qualities and the same style will be found, unchanged, unbettered, in these following paragraphs—after a lapse of more than fifty years, and after—as ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... gratify the natural claim of appetite in conjunction with moderate exercise was a system he favoured, as tending to a healthy condition of the body without trammelling the cultivation of the spirit. On the other hand, there was nothing dandified or pretentious about him; he indulged in no foppery of shawl or shoes, or other effeminacy ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon

... highest degree ever known on earth. They were expressed in their temples, their statues, and their pictures. They did not live for utilities. When art became a utility, it degenerated. It became more pretentious, artificial, complicated, elaborate, ornamental even, but it lacked genius, the simplicity of power, the glory of originality. The horses of the sun cannot be made to go round in a mill. The spiritual must keep within its own seclusion, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... cruel. He possesses the quality which friends call wisdom and enemies call craft. According to those who like him he is courteous, polished, thoughtful and dignified; according to those who dislike him he is insincere, pretentious, vain and arrogant. Both admit him to be genial, generous, self-sacrificing, popular and capable in the administration of affairs. If the opinion of his foes be accepted he is one of the greatest Malays on the page of history. If the opinion of his friends ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson

... the family with fruits and vegetables (on flowers, alas! but little store is set in the northern provinces), we cross the threshold, a spot hallowed by many traditions, and pass, through what in more pretentious houses may be called the vestibule, into the "living room." We become well acquainted with its arrangements, with the cellar beneath its wooden floor, with the "corner of honor" in which are placed the "holy pictures," ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston

... was compactly built of red brick along a country road, with trees and orchards surrounding it. It had a lofty and pretentious brick church of a modern type. Below and beyond it to the east is a long and not very broad valley which lies between the eastern flank of Ovillers Hill and the next spur. It is called Mash Valley on the maps. The ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield

... the Mississippi negro is equally true of his brother, or rather sister, in Virginia. Poor as this shiftless class usually is, many a cabin of rude logs nestles amid dainty trailing vines and bright hued blossoms, well worthy to adorn a far more pretentious mansion. I never knew any member of the colored race here to boast a pit or greenhouse.—doubtless because they can usually beg enough cuttings of tender plants from white neighbors in the spring to fill their tin cans. Little care they for flower pots; ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various

... the book for the reason that no one in her class at school had read it—usually a compelling reason for the eldest of the Madigans; but the poetic beauty, the extravagance of the romance, had whirled the girl away from her pretentious pose, and she was finishing it now because she could not help it; chained to it, it seemed to her, till she should ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson

... to take a little house with a big sunny dining room, and there she offered to the young bachelors of the town—in her aunt's name—better meals than they could get at the pretentious hotel, and she charged them scarcely more than ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston

... Several other kings followed and carried on this imposture, each building his palace and tomb in this untruthful way. What could we expect from kings content to lie in such tombs but lives of disgusting dissipation? A simple marble slab were surely better than these pretentious lies: anything so it be genuine. However, retribution came, and the dynasty is extinct, the present king living as ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie

... decorated their quarters in fine shape with flags, bunting, palms, and pictures. It was quite the talk of the town. The beauty and chivalry of the island were there. For refreshments they served commissary supplies with ice cream and cake. The guests thought it a very poor banquet for such pretentious people as the officers were. The Filipinos always have a ten or twelve course meal at twelve o'clock at their dances, especially when they have festivals or wedding banquets. There were many of these given. I could often watch the ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger

... pretentious announcements of "L'Esquisse d'une Philosophie," and you have admired the work on trust; for either you have not read it, or, if you have, you are incapable of judging it. Acquaint yourselves, then, with this speculation more brilliant than sound; and, while admiring the enthusiasm ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... "Children of Nature," by the Earl of Desart. A long list of very nasty books might easily be added, but these will be sufficient to illustrate the bad tendencies of fiction, and to show how thoroughly female authors have kept pace in immodesty and indecency with their rivals of the less pretentious sex.] ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... where some one had stuck it. We went by the taverne, or wine shop, which had a sign over its door—a creature remotely resembling a blue lynx. And through the door we saw half a loaf of bread and several bottles on a table. We went by a rather pretentious house, with pear trees in front of it and a big barn alongside it; and right under the eaves of the barn I picked up the short jacket of a French trooper, so new and fresh from the workshop that the white cambric lining was hardly soiled. The figure 18 was on the collar; we decided ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... the filmy base of Caste. I thrust through antique blood and riches vast, And all big claims of the pretentious Past ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... Mr. Johnson that New Bedford was a safe place, the comparatively unimportant matter, as to what should be my name, came up for considertion(sic). It was necessary to have a name in my new relations. The name given me by my beloved mother was no less pretentious than "Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey." I had, however, before leaving Maryland, dispensed with the Augustus Washington, and retained the name Frederick Bailey. Between Baltimore and New Bedford, however, I had several different names, ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass

... Wilkinson, by the Federal steamer Iroquois, is very exciting; and the charm thus felt at the outset is evenly distributed and remarkably well sustained throughout the book. Mr. Cowley's work is valuable, as supplying a place not filled by any of the larger and more pretentious histories of the late war. Full of vivid description, spicy detail, felicitous citation, and sparkling anecdote, Leaves from a Lawyer's Life is sure to prove a genuine source of pleasure to a ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various

... doctrine, he starts with a philosophical explanation of the universe. His writings and translations were forerunners of mysticism and set forth a peculiar pantheistic conception. His doctrine appears to ignore the pretentious authority of the church of his time and to refer to the earlier church for authority. In so doing he incorporated the doctrine of emanation advanced by the Neo-Platonists, which held that out of God, the supreme unity, evolve the particular forms ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... number Pete had given proved to have a pretentious doorway, and a landlady who, in response to the summons of the neat maid, appeared with a most impressive rustle of black silk ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter

... fearsome discord?" he asked. "It makes me think of an epitaph I once saw carved on a pretentious headstone in ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston

... in genius as to call her party openly by a name borrowed for the nonce from Mrs. Proudie. It was only among her specially intimate friends, Mrs. Harold Smith and some few dozen others, that she indulged in this little joke. There had been nothing in the least pretentious about the card with which she summoned her friends to her house on this occasion. She had merely signified in some ordinary way, that she would be glad to see them as soon after nine o'clock on Thursday evening, the —— instant, as might ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope

... importance to Butler's 'Analogy' is a far more voluminous and pretentious work, that of Bishop Warburton on 'The Divine Legation of Moses.' It is said to have been called forth by Morgan's 'Moral Philosopher.' If so, it is somewhat curious that Warburton himself in noticing this work deprecates any answer being ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... filled with boughs of fragrant hemlock; the smooth yellow floor with its coolness and sweet cleanliness invited you to enter; there were round braided mats spread before the bureau and rude washstand, and more pretentious ones in size and beauty were laid in front of the red, high-posted bedstead and over the brick hearth. There were, beside, in the apartment, two tables, an easy-chair with arms, its cushions covered with red calico, a camp ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin

... lied to him. Lied from first to last, deliberately and consummately, over each separate thing and over all the pretentious silliness and waste of it. Norah declared that it was so, and it looked like it. And more than anything it showed where my poor Viola had got to. It was so unlike her to lie, so unlike her to stand aside, where you would have thought she would have most wanted to plunge in; the ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair

... that?" asked Mr. Chester, as the machine was trundled into its shed—a pretentious affair built of corrugated iron and ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... passed a house no less pretentious than that of the Eliots; it was the home of Lemuel Hayden, whose only son, Bernard, had been compelled to leave Oakdale because of his jealous efforts and lying and plotting to injure Ben Stone, whom he bitterly ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott

... the Terrace and Pleasant Street there had long stood a cottage. In the midst of a large lot, with fine shade-trees around it and a beautifully kept lawn, it had never seemed out of place among its more pretentious neighbors; but now upon the death of its owner the property was divided into three lots and offered for sale. What this might mean was at first hardly realized, until one day men were discovered to be at work on the corner, ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard

... humiliation. Four thousand additional seamen and one thousand additional marines should be provided; and an increase in the officers should be provided by making a large addition to the classes at Annapolis. There is one small matter which should be mentioned in connection with Annapolis. The pretentious and unmeaning title of "naval cadet" should be abolished; the title of "midshipman," full of ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... because here the tourist gets little help from the architect, who, in modern times, has seldom the opportunity to study the subject at all, and accepts as solved the problems of early Gothic fenestration. One becomes pedantic and pretentious at the very sound of the word, which is an intolerable piece of pedantry in itself; but Chartres is all windows, and its windows were as triumphant as its Virgin, and were one of her miracles. One can no more overlook ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams

... trustees of the British Museum brought out Lister's Mycetozoa. Although these two English works both claim revision of the entire group under discussion, the latter paying special attention to American forms, nevertheless there still seems place for a less pretentious volume which for American students shall present succinct descriptions of North American species only. The material basis of the present work consists of collections now in the herbarium of the State ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride

... brilliant company. It is not rash to suppose that the lex sumptuaria of the year 18 was the first grave cause of disagreement. Julia, given, as Macrobius describes her, to profuse expenditure and pretentious elegance, could not take this law seriously; while it was the duty of Tiberius, who always protested by deed as by word against the barren pomp of the rich, to see that his wife serve as an example of simplicity to the other ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero

... Nor are these pretentious demands specifically denied; every man rather believes that he has a right to take part in her discoveries, to make use of her maxims, and to appropriate whatever else she may have to offer. But as philosophy, in order to become universal, must make use of her own vocabulary of unfamiliar ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... of insignificant, grave and pretentious young men, who, while they crowded, made their progress in the ranks of the sub-prefects, councillors of prefectures, picking up nominations under the feet of the influential guests as they would cigar stumps, disgusted him; men of twenty years, born, as it were, with white ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie

... sigh and declared that if only his peerless one were disenchanted, it would be all the good fortune he could wish for. Then Sancho tried his luck; but at the conclusion of Sancho's audience with the head, he did not seem properly awed, and his master became displeased with his pretentious expectations and reprimanded him severely in the presence ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... rough-and-ready revels that contrast not disagreeably with the social amenities left behind in the city. I spent some very pleasant hours of sunshine and twilight at the "Colonel's"; (he has as good a right to the title as many more pretentious dignitaries), though the "flying" was indifferent on both my visits. On the first occasion, though several varieties of fowl were bagged, we only secured one canvas-back, which was courteous enough to tumble to the stranger's ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence

... two-roomed wooden shed, sparingly furnished with a couple of tin pails. Humanity forbidding the incarceration of Captain Satterlee in such a hovel, the little consul passed on to Mulinuu, where the general Samoan Government held sway. The jail here was on a more pretentious scale. It consisted of a rectangular inclosure, perhaps sixty feet by forty, formed by four eight-foot walls of galvanized iron, and containing within five or six small huts of the kind that shipwrecked seamen might build on a desert island. In fact that was ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne

... see how charming they can be! There are many scenes between these covers that would well bear repetition, were they not too fresh in the reader's mind to require it; we will content ourselves with a single one, which contains the only pretentious writing of the whole novel, done at a touch, with a light, loose pen, but showing beyond compare the soul of the poet through the flesh of ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... form some of the facts that have been derived from the recollection of the older inhabitants as well as from family papers, which, in the lapse of time, would be forgotten and lost to the public. This is not so much a history as it is a sketch of history, but it may be made a beginning of a more pretentious historical work. I have endeavored to make it trustworthy, and in my efforts in this direction, I have not relied upon any information pretended to be conveyed in the recently published large "History of Otsego County," which is better known as a voluminous compilation of gross ...
— A Sketch of the History of Oneonta • Dudley M. Campbell

... keep silent when pretentious girls spoke of baby cousins and baby visitors—she who had a baby brother, who wrote her post-cards through his dear papa? She had promised not to tell about him—she knew not why—and she told. And one girl told ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster

... 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 ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... the narrowest part of the road Harry saw approaching him an open buggy of rather a pretentious character, driven by a schoolmate, Philip Ross, the son of Colonel Ross, a wealthy resident of ...
— The Tin Box - and What it Contained • Horatio Alger

... So Cinderella goes to the ball; but to teach her to be diligent and faithful in her engagements, her faery godmother enjoins upon her that she return home at twelve. Native beauty and grace attract the princely heart; and while the king's son pays no heed to her pretentious sisters, he is all grace and condescension to little Cinderella. Obedient to her engagement with her godmother, she returns in all the splendor and honor ...
— Cinderella • Henry W. Hewet

... workers' eyes. The departments are symmetrically arranged; the aisles are wide; the working space is ample; there is no fear to haunt machine tenders that a mis- step or a moment of forgetfulness will entangle them in a neighboring machine. The factory buildings themselves, without being pretentious, have pleasing, simple lines and unobtrusive ornamentation. They look like, and are, when the human equation does not interfere, ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott

... not a hymn but a decorated theme. And yet there is a sincere vain-longing running through Rossetti's work that keeps it from being artificial or pretentious. This was no less real for being vague. His work is an attempt to satisfy his vain-longing with rites of words and colour. He always sought to bring peace to his soul by means of ritual. When he was dying, he was anxious to see a confessor. "I ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd

... dreams of frequenting the Agora. Even a poor man's wife prefers to let her spouse do the family marketing. As for the "men folk," the average gentleman will go daily indeed to the Agora, but if he is really pretentious, it will be merely to gossip and to meet his friends; a trusted servant will attend to the regular purchasing. Only when an important dinner party is on hand will the master take pains to order for himself. If he does purchase ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis

... vaudeville by herself, Una tried to identify the theater of wizardry, but she never could. The Sessionses couldn't remember which theater it was; they thought it was the Pitt, but surely they must have been mistaken, for the Pitt was a shanty daubed with grotesque nudes, rambling and pretentious, with shockingly amateurish programs. And afterward, on the occasion or two when they went out to dinner with the Sessionses, it seemed to Una that Mr. Sessions was provincial in restaurants, too deprecatingly friendly with the waiters, too ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis



Words linked to "Pretentious" :   parvenue, inflated, high-sounding, high-flown, overblown, sententious, arty, highfalutin, flamboyant, hoity-toity, splashy, hifalutin, parvenu, flaunty, highfaluting, tasteless, arty-crafty, la-di-da, ostentatious, sesquipedalian, showy, grandiose, grandiloquent, jumped-up



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