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 🤣

@AngelinaFibres

Worked for the 'posh' supermarket for a while after taking early retirement from teaching. One of the joys of being on the shop floor was watching the 'performance parenting ' and competitive one upmanship of mums and dads. One Saturday I was filling the shelves. To the side of me was a woman with 2 children , talking to an older couple they weren't related to. She went on and on about the sporting, musical,educational wonder of her two mini geniuses. I thought I should probably make a mental note to watch out for them in the Olympics in 10 years time. Whilst she was chatting she was sending the children off to get foccacia, olives ( the organic ones dahling) and hummus ; all the usual twattery. Eventually the older couple moved on and the youngest child turned to his mum ,let out a massive sigh and said " So NOW can we go to McDonald's ". Chuckled to myself that her vision of her perfect organic, Boden wearing lifestyle was actually the smoke and mirrors we all thought it was.

The sounds like a summer's Friday afternoon in Waitrose in Swaffham when al; the hoorays are heading up to colonise the North Norfolk coast! It can be a really entertaining time, spotting them in the car-park and listening to them perform round the store!

WheelieBinPrincess Unbelievably wonderful and hilarious

*Name their child Ptolemy

How do you even pronounce that*

Tolemee

There was a programme on a few years ago called Restoration about doing up heritage properties that had fallen into disrepair including the Victoria Baths in Manchester. One of the presenters (an architect) was called Ptolemy Dean.

I like Ptolemy as a name but the spelling makes it hard to use, I think.

@KaleJuicer

In Florida a few years ago where I had scrimped and shopped around and managed to get a good deal at a luxury hotel, following our stay at a budget Disney hotel (the cheapest one). Cue seven year old rolling around on the ground screaming when we were waiting for the transfer "BUT I DON'T WANT TO GO TO THE FOUR SEASONS!"

We quote it back to him whenever he is pretentious now, much like the E C O N O M Y child above!

I'm not sure it's pretentious when a child makes comments based on their experiences though. When my grandchild was staying we went shopping and walking round Morrisons I asked her if she liked salmon, she'd be about 5, and she replied Yes but I'm not keen on lobster. Her grandfather replied Well that's a relief

I worked in a public government building and my boss dictated a letter to go out to our clients which included the phrase 'cardia of the community'. I tried to hint that using the phrase 'heart of the community' instead might be a bit more accessible but he insisted. I had so many phonecalls asking what cardia meant.

Someone I knew liked to tell people that she had worked with the architect on the design of their house, and that he had taken a number of her suggestions on board.

What she meant was that, as for pretty much all new-builds, you could choose your kitchen tile colours etc.

@SoosanCarter F&P show is heaven.

I love to hate TA nowadays. The unconscious classism is hilarious, as are all the suburban attitudes & tropes crammed into a supposedly rural setting ... I haven't really forgiven TA for NigelGate ...

@WitchityGrubby shop bought cake? The horror!

I was having a pizza with a young lady who declared very loudly "Where are the olives? I can't eat pizza without olives"
But she's only 4 and has been eating them like sweeties since she was a year old.

Someone on our street has a CBE, and insists on using it all the time on our whatsapp group

Eg
“Hello everyone. Does anyone have a couple of spare visitors parking permits I could buy as we have workmen here today
Thanks,
Peter Jones CBE (number 63)”

Different vein to most of these anecdotes but it's in my mind because, I suppose, it happened almost exactly a decade ago.

In I think autumn 2011 I was getting some 'autumn sun' [I didn't want to be the only person on the thread not to slip in a stealth boast] with my then c six month old baby [it’s actually not a bad age to take a kid away because you don’t have to pay for a seat on the plane, their dietary requirements are very simple because they’re mostly living off milk, etc].

By coincidence there were a few other couples with kids of similar ages who we often used to see hanging round the pool, so we got to know quite well. One day we were [they didn’t seem to mind] amusing ourselves by submerging our babies to the bottom of the pool so that they could swim to the surface. One of the dads there, a rather good-looking, well-dressed, fellow who I’d spoken to a couple of times, had brought a nice underwater camera so we were able to get some great photos of the kids.

I remarked to him that it had [then] been more or less exactly twenty years since the release of Nirvana’s seminal ‘Nevermind’ album. He became quite animated at this, remarking how much he’d liked the album in the day but midway through his excited spiel realised that he’d forgotten to mention that he’d liked the band before their popularity became widespread*. He really visibly clamped up, became quite defensive about it, mumbled something about having seen them play Manchester polytechnic in 1989, & then practically refused to speak to me about music [or, much else] for the rest of the holiday.

• • this was a genuine early 90s phenomenon, a hip underground band quite quickly became ubiquitous on the radio, the sort of thing you’d hear your mother whistling in the kitchen, forcing the hipsters to quickly abandon their interest.

@lockdownmadnessdotcom

*Name their child Ptolemy

How do you even pronounce that*

Tolemee

There was a programme on a few years ago called Restoration about doing up heritage properties that had fallen into disrepair including the Victoria Baths in Manchester. One of the presenters (an architect) was called Ptolemy Dean.

Oh! I have a pretentious Ptolemy Dean story! I know someone who used his practice to design a building for their house, because it’s listed and that’s what he specialises in

They only ever refer to it as ‘the garage, which was designed by the queen’s architect’

Many years ago while abroad, we were invited to lunch with the nephew (of a friend) and his wife. When I asked how long it took them to get to their home from the airport, she said, 'about 10 minutes in the helicopter'. I laughed and said 'wow' and she said, actually we had two, one for the luggage!

Holiday in another country, sat in the shallow children's splash pool with DH whilst DS1 and DS2 played on the water slides, a lady walks in with her young very cute baby, gentleman with her walks off somewhere and she sits there clapping the babies hands repeating 'we're rich, R-ICH, we're rich, R-ICH'

We were in fits of laughter, making up out own little saying, never known anything like it.

A woman in the first office I ever worked in used to sniff people’s bags.

Apparently because she found the smell of leather ‘intoxicating’.

She only owned Mulberry bags because they had a certain feel.

I was eighteen when I started there and my face must have been an absolute picture the first time I saw her do it. My Mum raised me too politely to ask ‘Debbie what the fuck are you doing to my Armani knock off?’ Jokes on her it wasn’t even real leather

@BoreiPuriHagafen..... A PhD, you say...?

@ddl1

Some university students in the 80s could be quite pretentious. I remember one fellow student who wore a felt hat, of which he was exceedingly proud, and would bring any conversation around to it: e.g. if people talked about the weather, he would say, 'I hope it doesn't rain because I don't want to get my felt hat wet!'

I was at uni in the 70s, & some people there could be seen as being pretentious - except they really were landed gentry (one later inherited a title) with black labs & going off to the country at the weekends to hunt/shoot/fish.

On being pretentious, however...
I've had a couple of bosses who liked to use the fashionable jargon of the day, e.g. humungous, cludge. One stated in a meeting that the system we were creating was 'heuristic'. I said it wasn't, but he insisted. So I asked if he really meant that the system learned for itself as it went along. "Well no," he said.

@AlternativePerspective

On honeymoon we went to a grill type place. You know, chicken, ribs, burgers, very much a grill.

So we’re standing there waiting to be seated when this child in front of us who couldn’t have been older than about 9 pipes up, “there’s just nothing on this menu to eat.”

To be fair, I said that when I found myself in a Hungry Horse. And kids quite often don't understand how food is described on menus. Plenty of adults have to ask for clarification.

@DaveCoaches

I don’t know if this classes as pretentious or just snobby, but overheard a woman bragging that she knew all the quiz answers about books but none of the ones about TOWIE and reality TV - fair enough but she was really sneery about it.

This definitely sounds like something I would say and I would not consider it pretentious at all - I don't own a TV, don't watch reality shows (except clips from the Kardashians on YouTube, and I am not a bit ashamed to confess I could probably name most of their kids) but I do read a lot and would consider myself pretty well read. If that's snobby I am OK with it :)

@HosannainExcelSheets

*I remember when a couple at work got engaged and a very pompous man swept in and said:

"Felicitations! Let's have a decco at the sparkler"*

I was taught by my very proper Granda that one never congratulates a lady on an engagement, as that would imply that she'd worked for it. Félicitations was the "correct" answer.

I was taught that one congratulated only the man, because he was fortunate to have found a wife . To the woman one should say “ I hope you will be very happy / best wishes “ or similar.

@upaladderagain

I was having a pizza with a young lady who declared very loudly "Where are the olives? I can't eat pizza without olives" But she's only 4 and has been eating them like sweeties since she was a year old.

Ah you see I think many people on hearing children talk about olives think they are terribly middle class, when in fact it's really just that they are available everywhere now.

I grew up in rural Norfolk in the 70s and 80s. Of course we didn't have olives!

My friend's wife (he is very well off but quite unassuming, she has married into the money and loves it) was planning their wedding and telling us they wanted crisp white linen on the tables because "glitter is so tacky". This came 6 months after she came to our wedding, a winter wonderland theme, complete with glittery table cloths...

p.s. they looked beautiful at ours, not tacky at all!

[quote Somethingsnappy]@BoreiPuriHagafen..... A PhD, you say...? [/quote]
Sadly, a certain type of person will take an opinion a lot more seriously if it comes from someone with the right academic credentials. I suspected that would apply to the poster I was disagreeing with...

Loving this thread. We were talking to my son's (now ex) girlfriend about where she lives - a small village near a small town in rural Somerset. Her family goes back generations there, and we commented how nice to have such deep roots. "Oh no!" she exclaimed "I have no ties to anywhere, I'm a free spirit. I see myself as a citizen of the world." We didn't like to point out she lives in the village she was born in and works at the school she went to. She hadn't really travelled much either.

Another one - on an escorted tour of Japan there was a really pretentious couple in our group. Constantly boasting about their lives. He left a scarf at one hotel and such a fuss was made about retrieving it as "it cost £200". They rarely joined the rest of us for dinner in whatever hotel we were staying at because "We're foodies", and would drone on about whatever 5* restaurant they had found locally, how much it cost etc. I was wearing a scarf one day and he said "I love your scarf darling, it's Versace no?" I said I didn't think so, I bought it in a charity shop, which shut him up. Later two ladies in the group sought me out to tell me that had given them such a laugh. On our flight home I was sure they'd be flying 1st class, given their endless bragging, but no they were stuck in cattle class with most of us.

And another: our daughter's wealthy inlaws came to stay for a weekend for a party. The wife commented how clean and tidy our house was (I'd spent 2 days cleaning in preparation. Yes they intimidate me!), and then said "I suppose it's a lot easier to keep clean when you only have a small house". Our house was actually quite a big 4 bed!