I believe the word we’re all looking for is prétentieux. sniff
Agree on the pronouncing borrowed words “authentically” if they have a standard pronunciation, including place names.
Referencing the Peace Corps/ a gap year randomly.
Drinking bottled water in a developed country, especially San Pellegrino.
Only buying organic or local food, and talking about it all the time.
Refusing to use facebook.
What makes the bolded pretentious? Just wondering. 
This is probably more aimed toward people in their 20s and 30s. My experience is that most people who refuse to use facebook do so for the “everyone’s doing it so I won’t” reason. That is pretentious, IMHO.
[QUOTE=spark240]
But sincere interest in esoteric matters is often misinterpreted.
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I’m pretty sure many on the Dope, myself included, have been accused of pretension at one time or another. Because a lot of us have some weird freakin’ interests.
It is if that’s the reason for nonusage. I was just curious because facebook always seemed like the pretenious verison of myspace/friendster. The things people are willing to go to either block people or the other extreme update on mundane things seems pretenious. It seems most everyone on face either thinks everyone wants to stalk them (the blockers) or thinks everyone wants to know what they’re going every hour on the hour. Both are pretenious. IMO, the ones who think they’re being stalked are more pretentious. I HATE social networking sites. :smack:
There was an English born professor when I was in college who would always correct people’s pronunciations even when saying something that had little or no connection to its American pronunciation. Example: there was a series of tornadoes that affected Piedmont, Alabama which, like the region of the Appalachians, is pronounced peed-MONT. A girl was talking about growing up there and he corrected her to say “It’s pee- AYD- mohn”. When he was counter-corrected he said “It’s a French name, it’s properly pronounced pee-AYD-mohn”.
He would also have fits at a restaurant here named The Elite and pronounced to rhyme with Dee-light. Practically everybody who went there (because it was an upscale place) knew how to pronounce elite, but the name had stuck back in the 1950s, beginning as a joke, and now it was the “Ee-Light”.
You could not convince him, even though it’s true, that local pronunciation of a proper name ALWAYS takes precedence. It’s not just an Alabama thing: England has families named Beauchamp who pronounce it BEE-cham, some Scots families pronounce McGregor as mac-gregor and some pronounce it mah-gregor, it’s universal and makes no difference what the etymology is. For that matter if I want to name my son Vasily but pronounce it Lamont then by God his name is pronounced Lamont; no problem if you mispronounce it the first time but if he tells you “It’s pronounced Lamont” he’s right.
He wouldn’t have it. Later learned the guy’s from British Columbia, incidentally: he’s not even English. He claims he picked up the accent when he was there in grad school. (Yeah, I’m buying it.)
[ul]
[li]A lot of stuff surrounding study abroad. #1: study abroad in Paris, but don’t say “I studied abroad in Paris”, say "I lived in Paris for awhile…’ to describe your time in the dorm with the other Americans.[/li][li]Fetishising the ‘authenticity’ of foods. Who cares how they do it in Sardinia? What I care about is how this one tastes.[/li][/ul]
pdts
:mad:
Holy shit, yes. The coworker I was talking about, snobbishly corrected one of our screenwriters on how to pronounce Anime… like the Japanese do (Ahhh-neee-mayy… apparently?) but really drawn out like that. It was just before we were to begin a meeting, and we were all just having some fun conversation.
He also pronounced the movie Moulin Rouge in a very thick, ridiculous, cartoonishly french accent. I was gobsmacked.
He was too cool for Star Wars, 
and asked us not to talk about it around him.
The subject of lightning came up, and I mentioned something about the delay from the flash to the sound of thunder… he interrupted me to school me that thunder is NOT sound waves from the crack of lighting, but clouds bumping into one another. 
:dubious: I tried to offer what I understood about lightning and thunder, but he just wouldn’t have it… saying it was a common misconception.
His condescension for anything popular was nauseating.
He was installing something on my computer (a Mac… God forbid! :rolleyes: ) to do some network thing. He got a bit confused not being familiar with the GUI, and I said, well, just drag and drop that folder to there. He says, “Drag and Drop?! I don’t drag and drop anything! How do I get to the UNIX command line?!” Whoa.
Not to mention he was an insufferable, condescending dick.
Ohhh, so many stories I could tell…
Also, someone else who worked there had a British accent. When I asked her where exactly she was from, and what brought her to the Detroit area, she says “Oh, no, I’m from Michigan originally.” I figured she meant she had moved to the UK when very young, but I found out later she lived most of her life right here, then met a Brit on some missionary thing in Africa, got married, lived in London for about a year, then aped the accent to ostensibly gain esteem by pretending not to be one of us unwashed Americans. :rolleyes:
(. . . so you’re saying that people “should” stop doing that?)
People who complain about other people’s prescriptive philosophizing, as if Ethics were not a branch of philosophy.
Almost as obnoxiously pretentious as the “I don’t even own a television” are pop-movie snobs.
Titanic is not on my short list of favorite all time movies, but I did see it in the theater twice and snuck in on the ending a third time when another movie got out early. The story was paint by numbers but visually it was one of the most impressive historical epics ever. At the time though I knew several people who trashed it without ever having seen it.
One of them owns an arthouse movie theater here and fits so many of the descriptions here. Everything made by Hollywood or that has ever won an Oscar is of course trash, everything that ever featured 5 minute closeups of a litter box in black and white and a character and featured a character named “Perplexity Adbot” who was on fire throughout the movie and lived in a giant tuna can and had subtitles even if it was in English is of course brilliant and just worlds better than Star Wars or Harry Potter or Titanic and anybody who can’t see that or who has no embarrassment saying that they enjoy some arthouse movies, think others are crap, and enjoy occasional popcorn movies is of course a moron.
Thank you. I AM a locavore-hell, I’m a farmer so I should be-but I have zero tolerance for food fundies. Look, I’m not part of a ‘movement’ and I’m not here to preach the gospel of local food. This is how I earn my living people.
Raising pastured poultry is not glamourous. I was ‘squirted’ by at least five chickens before 9 this morning.
There’s nothing trendy about chickenshit.
Actually, I’d say the pretentious thing is pointedly proclaiming how you do not use facebook. Just plain not using something is value neutral. Making a point that others should know it so they see how virtuous it makes you, that is where the pretense lies.
Heck, presuming that if you’re a 20-something you should be on facebook is itself, well, presumptuous.
You brake my heart!
Oh yes, these people are unbearable. I went to see Avatar by myself (because none of my friends wanted to go) just to see what the fuss was about, and I really enjoyed it just for the scenery and the cool 3D. But christ, you would have thought I had gone out for a night of kicking puppies based on the response of some of my co-workers. Yes, people, I know the plot was kind of dumb and the moralizing heavy-handed, but you know what? Sometimes I just want to be amused for a couple of hours, just look at the pretty colours and not think too hard.
I used to work in a pharmacy and we had a customer whose name was Cecille. I rhymed it with Lucille, which I thought was quite reasonable. She was considerably more than pissed off and told me, in no uncertain terms that it was pronounced ‘Sessillee’ (I’m not good at this typing-how-stuff-sounds thingy). I felt like asking her why she didn’t spell it Cecily but I’m too well brought up. 
Any experience with that lately? 
Not to get off on a tangent, but I think facebook use in that age range is a social norm at this point.
But you’re right- the main culprit is the broad based declarations, followed by quizzical looks and cries of “Don’t you value your PRIVACY?” and other statements that are based on the most hyperbolic perceptions of facebook and refusal to take advantage a very handy set of user controls.
Also, on an unrelated note, using the word utilize is pretentious. It means nothing different than use and is just extra letters.
People with ‘better than thou’ bumper stickers on their car. Like “Shoot your television”
My neighbor has one of these on her car, and I saw her checking out videos from the library. I said, “I thought you don’t have a TV?” And she looked offended and snotty and said, “I am PROUD to not own a television. We watch these on our computer.”
Oh, then that’s totally different.