In this most curious of his curious books, Hitchings recommends various shortcuts to pretend knowledge, including skim‑reading, waffling and avoiding the genuinely learned.
In others' words "He talks artlessly as a child about affairs of state, and does not pretend to a knowledge of anything of which he is ignorant.
I do not pretend to personal knowledge of Victorian or even Edwardian times, but I did grow up in a city (Indianapolis) of street cars on fixed tracks, a downtown central market and tree and shrubbery-covered college campuses, all of them regularly negotiated with impunity by women.
Theory of Mind: is the ability to attribute mental states beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc. to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own (from Wikipedia – Premack, D. G. & Woodruff, G. (1978).
As stated by Sobol-Shikler [12], the term affective state may refer to emotions, attitudes, beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge and moods.
It is an old American journalistic nostrum that "comment is free and facts are expensive", but US op-ed writers and their television counterparts at least make more effort than in Britain to pretend to first-hand knowledge of whatever they are commenting about.
Like a human child under four years of age, it might be that Koko didn't understand the concept of pretending, or didn't apply her knowledge of pretence uniformly.
She denigrated the pillow book genre and, unlike Shōnagon who flaunted her knowledge of Chinese, Murasaki pretended to not know the language.
Millennials identify with the Elon Musks of the world because they see the bigger picture seemingly effortlessly, whereas most politicians only pretend at prognostication or having a working knowledge of technology.
Since you are pretending to be a foreigner your working knowledge of the vocabulary would not be complete.
Now to be sure, I'm not pretending I have as broad or deep as knowledge of that.
