Quote:
Originally Posted by The Bearcat
I thought being pretentious meant trying to appear more smart and cultured than everyone.... or maybe I should invest in a dictionary.
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Somebody above used a dictionary entry for the word "pretense" - that's very misleading. Just because "pretentious" is a derivative of "pretense" doesn't mean you can gauge its most regular meaning from the latter.
The most frequent and commonly intended meaning of "pretentious" is the meaning of assuming an air of dignity and self-importance. This is
also incidentally what is generally meant in the music press (and all art press) when some artist is deemed pretentious.
In that case, you can only really say that an artist is pretentious if they make that clear through what they say or how they behave.