A delicious merlot

Being a fairly straight-forward person (I hope), I can sniff out pretentious-ness in a split second, as can (and could) the rest of my family. So I'm fond of describing other people as pretentious.

But what exactly does pretentious mean? I would say any or all of the following:

• Name dropping ("As Ian McEwan once said to Zadie Smith....")
• Claiming to know all about some obscure topic ("Of course marine biology has a lot to say about coral reefs")
• Claiming to have met lots of famous people ("As I was saying to Greta Thunberg....")
• Posing as a connoisseur of wine ("A delicious merlot. Strong alpine notes with overtones of pampas grass")
• Claiming to have read every significant book ("I absolutely adore Ulysses. Molly Bloom is quite unforgettable")
• Purporting to be generally better educated, more discerning, more sophisticated ("Anyone with half a brain can see the economy is about to collapse")
• Slavishly following the latest fashions ("My dear, bootleg jeans are so last year")
• Maintaining that difficult, laborious novels are superior to ones that are readable and uncomplicated ("The reader should have to do a bit of work")
• Concocting ridiculous explanations of art works ("James is interested in the interface between spatial awareness and partial enclosure")
• Liking restaurants that offer tiny meals with strange ingredients rather than a good plateful of something with chips ("This chef is so wonderfully experimental")
• Peppering your conversation with foreign phrases ("It was a coup de theatre, a performance sans pareil")

I think you'll have the general idea by now. So au revoir, mes amis, wishing you oodles of joie de vivre and esprit de corps. Á chacun son goût, as Pablo Picasso once said.

PS: Jean thinks I'm being pretentious myself by acting superior to people who're pretentious. Could she be right?