Quote:
Originally Posted by Rainard Jalen
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.
|
I thought it was a fairly decent definition. 'Pretentious' is hard to define because people misuse it so much now, but some of those sub-definitions are correct. But I did clarify it in a music context anyway.