stuffed shirt

plural stuffed shirts · alternative stuffed-shirt

1. idiomaticinformalOne who is pompous or self-important, especially one who is either officious or punctilious in a position of authority.

   Oh? I remember, you came to Chicago once. Bit of a stuffed shirt, aren't you?

   1944, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter 5, in The Razor’s Edge […], 1st American edition, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., →OCLC, section ii, page 208

   4 more examples

   "Don't you come the high-and-holy on me. You and your smooth, big, phony stuffed-shirt of a father."

   1914, Samuel Hopkins Adams, chapter 30, in The Clarion

   Bernstein, am I a stuffed shirt? Am I a horse-faced hypocrite? Am I a New England school marm?

   1941, Herman J. Mankiewicz, Orson Welles, Citizen Kane (motion picture), spoken by Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), RKO Radio Pictures

   Dr. Laughlin was the only one in a movie party who detested the second male lead—"I regarded him as overserious, pedantic, a stuffed shirt."

   1952 May 26, “Medicine: Mind Matters”, in Time, archived from the original on 01 Dec 2012

   The opportunistic style that was the bank's trademark still prevails and continues to attract talented young Hong Kongers looking for an alternative to the stuffed-shirt culture of most U.S. and European banks.

   2000 July 10, Frederik Balfour, “Return of a Hong Kong Highflier”, in BusinessWeek