pretentiosity

He allowed the schemer with something to vend to humbug him, and he was pounced upon by troops of aristocratic and “society” people, whose impecunious pretentiosity is ever forcing them to hunt down every creature from whom they think money may be wrung.

1898 June 10, The Investors’ Review, volume I, number 23, page 819

I would gladly sell first quarter moons / At two bits a bunch like bananas: / That silly incomplete pretentiosity, / That scrawny, flea-bitten planet, / Dogging the steps of the earth, / Rattling after the earth / Like an old can / Tied to the shining car of newly[-]weds.

1925 July 5, Stockton Independent, volume 128, number 155, Stockton, Calif., section two, page 1

I have found some exciting speculations, some estimable aspirations, some enduring fables, much vanity, much pretentiosity—and scarcely a glimmer of truth:[…]

1935, The New English Weekly: A Review of Public Affairs, Literature and the Arts, page 434

Hatred of baroque pretentiosity and the feeling that the ode-writers aspired too high produced many parodic odes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

1949, Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature, Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, page 638

Yet something of this strange author’s deep concern for our spiritual welfare does manage to penetrate through the blanket of stream-of-consciousness pretentiosity in which he has tried to hide it.

1957, Encounter, page 80