Cohn's words presaged the rise of punk, which emerged, a decade later, as a corrective to the rock-as-art pretensions that "Sgt. Pepper" represented.
But her intellectualism (she was educated at Oxford) often comes across as pretension.
While he has some interest in the pop-classical fusions that are taking place everywhere today — he should, because he's a leader in such fusions — he regards the adulation of most old classical music as pretension by rich people and arrivistes, and dismisses classical music's, or maybe any music's, claims to spiritual and moral value.
Ben Jonson was so jaundiced about anything that struck him as pretension that when poor Shakespeare got enough money to buy a coat of arms and the motto "Non Sanz Droict" ("Not Without Right") Jonson immediately introduced a dim-witted social-climbing character into a play just so that he could have him say that his motto was "Not without mustard".
It was found that as pretension increases, deflection decreases and the modulus of elasticity increases.
To our generation, the mystique of French Bordeaux is perceived as pretension.
Excerpted from The People's Almanac by David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace HONORÉ DE BALZAC (1799 1850) Balzac, one of the supreme writers of realistic fiction, was, in his own life, a man of gross appetites and pretensions as well as of gargantuan genius and accomplishment.
The use of Babel as a character is one of the book's pretensions, as is the scattering of Russian words like papirosa, without any explanation of what they mean (a papirosa, for the record,is a type of Russian cigarette with an inch of strong dark tobacco at the end of a cardboard tube).
This didn't work, leaving the plot hamstrung by what emerged as mere pretensions.
Franzia makes a sport of teasing Napa for what he sees as its pretensions: terroir and microclimates and the winemaking "lifestyle".
