Date: Fri, 27 Sep 1996 17:57:35 EDT From: my fragrants tink? Subject: FILLER: (A Ramble on A Word!) Pretentiousness? Moi? [a twisted scroll was found in his pocket, and on unrolling the spindled mass, the following was apprehended...:-] In our recent discourses, recourses, and any other courses of the list which may be involved, the term "pretentiousness" has been bandied about. In a fit of sanity, I determined to investigate this word to determine its suitability for use in mixed company [frogs, valedictorians, wood nymphettes (probably a cello, too?), queens, centenarian grandmothers, ole docs, and I'll bet there's a walrus in the house to keep the wuffie company, or at least dancing bouys - that's a mixed company, if anyone ever had one]. I did venture briefly into taking the word apart. Once it broke into pretent and usness (ignoring iou as the promissory note untaken, and having cleaned the goo off my hands), I pondered short and pitiful on the concept of a pretent to the main tent and decided that unless we are talking circi (one circus is not enough for this bunch, we need many circi!) - where was I? Oh, yes, unless we are ready to circumcise the tent, I don't think we need to investigate its little pretent. Usness, of course, is a reminder that we have met the enemy and they is us, which probably brings in the crocodiles, alligories, and other wildlife which should be housebroken before you let them in the tent, or the pretent. Seeing that this forthright attempt on the word wasn't going to provide enough bafflement, I delved into the pages of the dictionary, prepared for synonyms and other wild nyms of the lexical frontears. There I discovered pretentiousness, tucked away between preteen and preterminal. I quote the OAD (Oxford American Dictionary) - the noun form of the adjective pretentious meaning either showy or pompous. (shall we ignore the obvious "pre tent us"? I mean, what does it mean that we are not yet under a tent together, although we may someday be in tent together? okay, let's ignore that and go back, all but those who have fallen asleep in their sleeping bags under the starry skies.) Showy? We are that, at times. Admittedly, we occasionally fall back into telling, but...the noun form of this adjective would be "show", correct? so we are a show! Simple truth, yet I felt the urge to dig deeper, to follow that word wherever it led, to root in unspeakable vowels, to twist the moustache off that mean word and see its naked upper lip! I ignored pompous, since most of us don't even know where that volcano is, let alone march in parades or approve of vast grasslands. Bereft of circumstance, deflated of our hot air, we are depomped, not the pompee. (Webster's and American Heritage dictionaries allude to pretentiousness as involving claiming or demanding a position of distinction or merit. American Heritage notes that this is especially pretentious when unjustified. Since the only position we got around here is the guy who cleans the pipes, and there ain't no justice involved in that position, this golden mean obliviously has little to do with our list. However, it is noticeable that what these dictionaries impute to pretentious, the OAD prefers to consider as part of pretension! "you say pretentious and I say pretension, you say contentious and I say contention, you do the woodoos and I do the wootin', let's toss our tious and tion?) Bravely digging deeper into the words in that vein, I found pretension. Pretension, either the assertion of a claim to something or another term for pretentiousness! So before true tension, there is pretension. A bit like foreplay for the Type A? And then, of course, I resorted to the root, the true pretense which refers to pretending and make-believe (how apropos! the fiction that greases the writer's meal ticket, n'est ce pas?) or the claim to merit or knowledge... So before you pick your tense, pretense! Pretend, make them believe you, and guide them to merit or knowledge when you have it. This is the way of the writer, to point where the moonlight falls, to sketch rainbows and glistening pools in plain inky words, to bridge the gaps between the vast ocean of lack of knowledge and that higher plateau of unknown truth to which we would go... Thus pretentiousness corrodes to being the level of "willing suspension of disbelief" which is induced by writers? So, interpolating wildly from past distempers, one might discover that a sentence such as "The pretentiousness that the majority of you display is astonishing" actually means that one is astonished (may one suggest amazed?) at the extreme level of "willing suspension of disbelief" which the majority of our writing (deep in the show, don't tell mire) causes the reader to bestow upon us? May I be the first to thank you for these kind words? [here, the trail of inky bits was torn, and the sign of the nom de plumage albeit illegible...but something in the weight of the words, their heft and lackadaisical sway, it all spelled: tink