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• a  making claim to or creating an appearance of (often undeserved) importance or distinction
  a pretentious country house
  a pretentious fraud
  a pretentious scholarly edition
• a  intended to attract notice and impress others
• s  (of a display) tawdry or vulgar

• Naturally, while attending one of those rites of pretentious power, like the Alfalfa Club dinner, our not-so-mythical Beltway denizens would look across a crowded ballroom or two .
• Some have argued that the continued use of "comix" is pretentious and useless.
• As a pretentious, self-important yuppie hipster, I thought it was a great idea to pay a baby-name consultant, an occupation created just a year ago.

• ostentatious

• unpretentious
• unostentatious

News & Articles

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• In Florida, Nik Wallenda readies for Grand Canyon high-wire act
  By Saundra Amrhein SARASOTA, Florida (Reuters) - Dressed casually in a T-shirt, calf-length cargo pants and flip-flops, Nik Wallenda looks no different from many of the hundreds of spectators who have turned out in recent days to watch him practice for his next high-wire act. There are no pretentious airs about him, and no spangled outfits. "Hey, how ya doing, man?" he asked while stopping to ...
  June 16, 2013 - Reuters via Yahoo! News

Quotes

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• Mamata Banerjee in Hindustan Times
  Lashing out at the Trinamool Congress, he said it "has been stripped off all its pretentious of defending people's interests by being part of the central government and going along with these anti-people measures".
• FRAZIER MOORE in Forbes
  He always brings some needed irreverence and smarts to pretty much anything he does,Moore said. "The Oscars are an often very pretentious, self-important institution, and somebody like Jon Stewart is very useful to help deflate a little of...
• Robert Redford in BBC News
  There's nothing pretentious - no red carpets, no limousines allowed,Redford told the Associated Press. "And so people come and mingle together like a real community of artists. I love the fact that it's successful and that it's giving the...