put on frills

present singular third person puts on frills · participle present putting on frills

1. datedidiomaticTo act in a pretentious or snobbish way.

   […] your sneers against Doctor Hardy are lies! He doesn’t put on frills, or have an office in a fashionable location, or drive around in an expensive automobile.

   1956, Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night, New Haven: Yale University Press, published 2001, act 1, page 31

   2 more examples

   […] he put his head in again, and cussed me for putting on frills and trying to be better than him; and when I reckoned he was gone, he come back and put his head in again, and told me to mind about that school, because he was going to lay for me and lick me if I didn’t drop that.

   1884 December 10, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], “Chapter 5”, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade) […], London: Chatto & Windus, […], →OCLC

   “She said we were really the only people on the ship they cared to know.” “I shouldn’t have thought a missionary was such a big bug that he could afford to put on frills.”

   1921, W. Somerset Maugham, chapter 7, in The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands, New York: George H. Doran, page 242

   Synonyms: give oneself airs, put on airs, show off