`She's so-o-o-o-o pretentious" - it's an epithet that, like "flakey" and "boring" you just don't want applied to you. Other descriptions such as "aggressive" or "sensible" or even "sick", you can kind of justify and make your own ("Well, I'm sure everybody thought Simone de Beauvoir was both aggressive and sick, but she seems to have done all right by herself"), but pretentious is something that other people are.
Pretentiousness is something that I've always abhorred with a vengeance, despite being half in love with a boy who slept the night on Jim Morrison's grave when I was in school. Once I reached the watershed age of 17, I quickly started to watch out for signs of pretentiousness like people watched for sneezes in the days of the plague.
This was partly for reasons of style - once the days of Jim Morrison worship were over and done with, it was not very cool to be pretentious. Admittedly when you're a teenager this is a very subjective thing - the term pretentious was very often applied to something that I didn't know anything about or had no interest in. But soon, I really began to hate pretentiousness for itself. This could be because I was then in college, which as everybody knows is just a hotbed of the pretentious. The real eccentrics I adored but the people who waltzed around saying "Of course I simply wouldn't be able to sleep without a copy of Thoreau under my pillow" got very short shrift.
This was probably for two different reasons. The first was that this brand of affectation was usually employed by a certain brand of girl or boy for a certain reason, and horror to say, it often worked. I remember watching in horror when one rather fabulous-looking girl cooed up at a circle of boys that she had got a turquoise ring in Tunisia "because everything is turquoise over there" and they all nodded in admiration.
I felt like butting in and taking everybody through the statement step by step - were the mosques all turquoise for example, and what about what she called "the indigenous peoples", were they all bright blue too? At the time, I felt my ire was justified owing to the completely ridiculous nature of pretty much everything she said, but in hindsight, I can see it was probably just because they all fancied her more than me.
However, there is still something about pretentiousness that is just infuriating in itself. After walking out of the last Antonioni film, Beyond the Clouds, in a complete tizzy of rage about all those mournful French women leaning against pillars and saying things like "It is the flaw of danger that it bores me", I tried to work out why I find it so irritating.
I decided it's because there is a sense of superiority implied by the pretentious. With a statement like "I love the indigenous peoples - they're so turquoise" or whatever, what you're actually saying is "I'm a person with superior thought processes to you. I'm assuming that you don't know what I'm on about. I'm also presuming that you have no value judgment. And you find me attractive." Funnily enough, this does tend to annoy most people.
So, having had a life-long dislike of the pretentious, in both theory and practice, I was very surprised to find myself agreeing with a friend at a party when he made a spirited defence of intellectual affectation. "Better pretentious than anti-intellectual" were his rather succinct words.
It could just have been the drink taken, but I found this a rather stirring manifesto. It struck me that, really, I was rather sick of the way in which people play down any claim to knowledge or learning in every day life. Of course this is different if you are an academic or an expert or a panellist on Changing Times, when it's your duty never to shut up about how much you know, but for most of us, the ethos of not showing off still reigns supreme.
It's this ethos that stops you using big words when you know they're the right ones to use, or playing classical guitar while watching the sunset over the Bull Island or telling the man you buy your cigarettes from that he reminds you of a Vermeer painting - all of which could be considered highly pretentious.
But most of the time, we're only really not doing these things out of fear of being laughed at or considered a terrible poser. It's that same impulse that makes us use silly voices if we use a quote from Shakespeare - "A rose by any other name, if you know what I mean" - or make silly little flapping movements in the air to denote quotation marks if we dare to use the right word of more than five syllables.
Not so long ago we were all quoting huge chunks of the classics at each other and using words like dystropia as though we were saying butter - you wouldn't have caught Jane Austen or Samuel Pepys pretending that they didn't know how to pronounce moratorium. Admittedly, not everybody has had the privilege of an education that would teach them big words or fab intellectual ideas to bandy around, but is that really any reason for others to pretend that they don't know these things?
Isn't it, in fact, rather patronising to dumb down and presume that other people won't know or won't want to know what you're talking about? Once it takes hold, the disease of dumbing down and sneering at any display of knowledge or intellect is a hard one to get rid of and a rather insidious one to identify. So, now in a very satisfying volte-face I have decided that I'm all for the pretentious. At least there's something aspirational about it, a thing that is in danger of getting lost in an era in which there is no shame to knowing all the words to a Spice Girls' song, all the members of Arsenal football team and all the names of the Tellytubbies. Madrigals and a spot of Proust anyone?