What is the most pretentious thing you've seen someone do?

[kinzarose]

Inspired by another thread. When I was at university there was an older lady who thought she was vair posh, was very keen to have her designer labels on display and loved name dropping brands into conversation. We had a group tutorial over lunch once, so we all ate together. This woman took a two foot (yes, literally) wooden salt and pepper mill out of her bag, stood up and started grinding pepper onto the shop bought sandwich she had with her. It was just the most pretentious thing ever, she was a "food snob" apparently 🤣

@DaveCoaches

I would be like that though, it's not bragging, just fact - I am pretty good at art and literature in trivial pursuit but rubbish at tv. We used to laugh about this at the pub quiz, none of us watched much tv nor sports but cleaned up on history and science.

@BritWifeInUSA

Oh and for true pretentious twattery, the Bolognese thread from last weekend was world-class.

It was, it truly was.

A performer who puts on what she calls a 'global accent' to show how international she is-- born and raised in Cheshire! She didn't used to speak like that either.

Ok maybe the opposite of pretentious, but I was with my husband on a business trip in Saudi, and since he used to travel a lot we often stayed in an extremely nice hotel where got to access the lounge for unlimited champagne, wine and dinner + breakfast. Think top of the top (no need for a menu) and then a bit more. 😂 Anyway, every night there was an American business man in his 60’s sitting by himself in his very nice suit talking loudly on his phone sounding very important drinking his champagne. And then every morning for breakfast (as usual in nice suit and tie) he’d tell the waiter what he wanted, looked around and when he thought noone was watching he took out this giant tub of Peter Pan Creamy Peanut Butter from his bag to spread quickly on his bread and put it back again. It just made me smile, and not feel so out of place after all. 😂

I was buying a few things in Iceland and the woman in front of me very loudly stated to the cashier that she didn't normally shop there but that she was having dinner guests and had heard the scallops, prawns and salmon were WONDERFUL. Naturally, I had a wee peek and, yes indeed, she was buying all of the above. The cashier smiled politely. Then a lonely little packet of fish fingers sailed down the conveyor belt. 'Oh, those are for my grandson'. She was very flustered. News flash - we don't care missus. We don't care where you shop. And we don't care what you and your grandson eat. Try the £1 pepperoni pizza. My DS would eat it every day if I let him! I still think she went home and had a fish finger sandwich smothered in ketchup. Yum

@RashOfBees

Talking about school with a woman I used to know socially and mentioned that I’d read a particular play for A level. Think Shakespeare, Chaucer, etc. She immediately gleefully said SHE had done it for GCSE. How very advanced. Much cleverer than the idiots who have no doubt based PhDs on it.

Same person once referred to doing something “in Q3 next year”. I thought I’d misheard so asked her to repeat. To which she smugly said “Q3! It’s what we in the business world say when we talk about summer!”

And told me she was taking antidepressants as her GP said there was no point her trying counselling. She was too intelligent for it to work, apparently; she would just use her superior powers of reasoning to defeat any talking therapy. I was in counselling at the time.

Loads more where those come from.

The counselling one is what my ex-h did for himself. Was given CBT alongside anti-depressants and gave up claiming he was too intelligent for CBT and could see right through it. Was also very sneering about his own intelligence compared to the counsellor's. He also thought he was too intelligent for anti-depressants, but that's another story.

I met someone who said he couldn't tell me what he did, strongly hinting that it was for my own safety

He then couldn't resist telling me anyway....

@Idony

The lady in the other thread who gave her flat a name rather than have an A on its number.

🤣 That was my first thought too!!!!

We often visit an English heritage property near to my mum's house when we're with her. My primary aged DC call it 'grandma's castle' and I haven't the heart to correct them. And maybe, deep down, I feel kind of gleeful that they might mention it at school

Where's rhe Bolognese thread ??!!!

@Teabag37

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4363263-To-think-this-is-far-too-much-food

Our 21 year old DS is definitely on the pretentious side. He's a lovely young man but doing Politics and Philosophy at university has turned into an existential wreck. One of his classics was 'If Oscar Wilde was alive, what great friends we'd be...'

@SophieKaczynsky

When my children were at primary school, a designer clad mum told everyone that her husband worked in London in investment banking and that they lived on a very posh, expensive road in the town.

Turned out they lived in a 1980s three bed semi. Oh and the husband was in prison!

Maybe just maybe the woman didn't want her children to know where their father was ?

It's me, I'm pretentious. I don't watch television. I will try to watch the occasional series box set with my partner, but Mad Men, The Sopranos, and two out of the five seasons of The Wire were the only ones I made it all the way through. Reality and competition stuff is the worst (even the "nice" ones like Bake Off are absolute idiotic drivel) but it's all terrible, pat, cliche-ridden garbage. 99% of films are terrible, too, but at least those are over in two hours and you're not expected to come back for another ten episodes.

I remember a woman at work who used to say, we put the Audi in the double garage !!!!! funny i see her on the bus now on a regular basis.

@GrumpyTerrier

A performer who puts on what she calls a 'global accent' to show how international she is-- born and raised in Cheshire! She didn't used to speak like that either.

I don't sound like how I used to either. Nothing to do with being pretentious and everything to do with spending time in different places and making it so that people understand me.

Not THE most pretentious - but I was attending an OU Tutorial at a Learning Centre, and noticed some children's drawings on the wall, captioned "Of Mice and Men". Just chatting to a fellow student during a break and mentioned Steinbeck, and she turned to me and said "Oh, I wouldn't know - WE did Shakespeare...." (So did I, but that wasn't really the point of what I was saying.) I didn't continue the so-called conversation.

My dad worked in the shipyard as a fitter. He told people he was a marine engineer. But he was on the wind up to be fair.

[quote Wbeezer]@SoosanCarter as the parent of a Scottish student from an ordinary school, I agree. DS2 definitely feels in a minority doing an arts subject, its limited his friendship prospects a bit. I'm also on the st Andrews parents Facebook page (set up by American parents) i joined partly out of curiosity and partly in case i could clear up cultural confusions. Let's just say there are often remarks made that would be right at home on this page and my blood pressure has often suffered![/quote]
Sent you a pm!

@babybunny123

I remember a woman at work who used to say, we put the Audi in the double garage !!!!! funny i see her on the bus now on a regular basis.

Ha! That reminds me of a school friend, she always used to think she was better than the rest of us, anyway a few years after we'd left school I got on bus that she was on, said hi, and she panicked and started jabbering about how she was only on the bus because, "daddy had taken the BMW to be repaired".

A friend was showing off this bottle of red wine,tellling me it was actually quite an expensive one. She then poured it into a casserole she was cooking -"oh this will taste wonderful, I don't cook with shitty wine" and put said casserole in oven. Unfortunately for her she then proceeded to get very pissed on some more "lovely wine" and forgot all about her dinner. When she finally remembered it she took it out of the oven to find it was burnt and completely dried out. 😂

@Suddenlyfamily5

My MIL telling me about her trousseau.

Aaaaw ......this is old fashioned terminology and dates from times when people didn't have much and would build up bit by bit some especially nice clothes for their marriage . It wasn't that long ago either eg my Mum started work at 14 and had one blouse she had to wash and dry every other night .

Went to university with a lot of pretentious twats… one time a woman in my tutorial told me that she was having a port tasting for her 21st birthday and that she’d fallen out with one of her best friends because she hadn’t invited her to the party since she didn’t like port and ‘it would be a waste’.

My 21st was a fancy dress party with a ‘punch’ made from White Lightning, fruit juice and miscellaneous white spirits mixed together in a bin from the pound shop

A colleague wear sun glasses in the office (not a particularly sunny day either), when asked "why are you wearing sunglasses indoors", her response was because they are top of the range Prada (or whoever!).

£4k spent on a four-year old's birthday party. They had caterers. And a wheel of brie.

The marquee came down in the sudden storm, though. Cue a dozen screaming toddlers charging into the house, and a dozen parents in Breton tops/red trousers leaping and darting about in the garden trying to catch the flailing bits of marquee fabric and metal poles, trying to rescue the cous-cous and save the brie from watery ruin. Outwardly I said, "Oh dear!" and helped to fetch bunting, inwardly I laughed and laughed and laughed.