Anyone want to trot out their own pretentiousness? I’ll go first.
I regularly piss off and disgust myself when people ask me what my company manufactures. Right out of the gate, I’m all “we make drug-eluting stents, which are tubes placed in coronary arteries to prop them open. Nowadays drug-eluting stents are most common, but this technology came after bare-metal stents, which…”
I’m sitting in the goddam sidecar, watching myself trot out my half-baked medical information overload. I’m clearly overcompensating for the fact that I’m was a lazy English major who barely passed the bare minimum science requirements in college, and was in fact shilling for the Pokemon franchise before I landed this job.
Someday I hope to have real expert knowledge, and some goddam humility! :D:smack:
Man, don’t come to L.A., unless you want to spend 60-75% of the time cringing. All the stuff you mentioned as “pretentious” is distressingly (to you, at least) common around here. Hell, my 9-year-old eats sushi, my ex is living with a nice Wiccan lady, and my parents (a Salvadoran couple in their 60s, mind you) buy organic vegetables and recycle cans and plastic bottles. I would especially advise you not to visit the San Gabriel Valley, where people not only eat sushi, they eat it, and other things, with chopsticks! The horror! Some of them aren’t even Asian!
Of course I only eat *true *hamburgers, prepared the way they make them in Hamburg, Deutschland. When I was backpacking through Europe I ate them there and I just can’t bring myself to eat the plebeian American version now.
I was involved in a wedding in a very rural area recently, and the bride (who lives in the city, as do I) gave me a beautiful set of sushi plates and chopsticks as a bridal party gift. I opened the present in front of the some of her relatives, and immediately the brides grandmother asked me if I knew how to use the chopsticks. I said I did, and someone else replied “of course she does, she’s from the city”, as if it was the most pretentious thing possible.
Maybe this is because I am originally from another country, but Andrea is a fairly “standard” name, and “Ahn-DRAY-uh” is as far as I am aware the standard pronunciation. I don’t think its pretentious to correct an egregious mispronunciation of one’s name. If I were named John and someone kept calling me JOON I’d correct them too!
About chopsticks – I do think it’s slightly pretentious the way westerners often eat sushi (especially nigiri) with chopsticks ‘to be authentic’… when they are standardly eaten by hand in Japan.
Another classic: thinking that being rude to serving or waiting staff makes you look high class and discerning. It doesn’t.
This. The movie is fine. If you want to look cool by hating something all the “cool people” hate, well, that’s stupid.
People who get offended if you mispronounce their name or last name even though there was no way you could have anticipated some unusual pronounciation. Get a life.
[Every single teacher in highschool badly mispronounced my last name and I never corrected them - because who the fuck cares? I know it’s hard to pronounce, give 'em a break.]
Any middle-to-upper-class urban kid who identifies as Wiccan/Pagan/Kabbalah/Buddhist/some other mystical fringe crap. I don’t care about all the “common misconceptions”, it’s still just ridiculous.
I thinks it’s pretentious when I see a brand name displayed on anything other than the so-named object.
If your motorcycle has “Harley” printed somewhere on it, it’s an identifying mark.
If your purse has “Harley” on the side of it, it’s pretentious*.
This goes double for those trucks sporting large decals proclaiming the owner’s choice of boat, motorcycle, gun, etc. This is fairly common around here.
*My neighbors have joined the “Cult of Harley”. They are festooned in so much Harley shit that they’re becoming a laughingstock. Harley do-rags, shirts, pants, handkerchiefs, purses, keyrings, jewelry, playing cards, you name it. Apparently the Harley Davidson company can produce anything except mufflers. :rolleyes: While watching them prance around in their gear, Mz Pullin (quietly) wondered if they had Harley tampons too.
Maybe they just haven’t heard about eating sushi by hand; that bit of knowledge made me happy because my chopstick skills aren’t that great. Years ago, my brother spent time on the North Shore of the Big Island; the lady who ran the local convenience store made sushi.
My long-deceased grandmother was into organic gardening. And recycling has old roots in “being cheap.” A neighborhood store revels in local foods, produced sustainably if not 100% organically. But the major goal is making food that tastes good; if their bacon is pretentious, sign me up!
I find myself being pretty forgiving about pretension. But there’s alwaysan exception.
I’ve remarked on this before, but on the SDMB, “pretentious” often seems to mean “things I don’t like”. To me, pretentious means, specifically, “trying to be something you aren’t”.
Thus if someone uses French phrases excessively and unnecessarily when speaking English, and particularly if they don’t speak French, I’d say they’re being pretentious. But if someone owns an iPhone… well that’s just “something you don’t like”, not someone trying to be something they aren’t.
Lots of Buddhist hate out there. I kept my Buddhism on the D-L when I first converted, precisely to avoid unwarranted assumptions about my motive. But it’s been ten years now; I’m pretty sure I’m not just putting on airs. Despite its ridiculously obtuse presentation (at times), Zen is about as unpretentious and un-mystical as religion gets.
A student once asked his master, ‘‘What is Buddha?’’
The master replied, ‘‘Dried shit on a stick.’’
In other words, it’s about everyday life. Shitting, washing the dishes, making love, walking to the car, whatever.
But Buddhism isn’t just about shitting on sticks. You also you get to hit people with them.
Yeah, I’m kind of wondering about that, as well. I have a friend whose name is pronounced Ahn-DRAY-uh - what is she supposed to do, just sit happily and let you pronounce it wrong? She’s not pretentious person, she just prefers that people don’t call her by the wrong name.
Interestingly, it’s message boards on the internet where I get the loudest ‘‘down with TV’’ lectures. I once had someone rant to me about the evils of TV in a *Facebook *post. As if Facebook is so much more constructive.
I certainly share the skepticism for Facebook (to put it politely). But it’s still true that Facebook isn’t, in fact, the same as television, the medium. Palo Verde’s neighbor seems to have confused the medium with the actual box. There are plenty of ways to use the latter without the former. Watching movies is one. I’m reading this right now on a television screen.
I’ll go first.