Pretentiousness is always someone else’s crime. It’s never a felony in the first person. You might cop to the odd personality flaw; the occasional pirouette of self-deprecation is nothing if not good manners. Most likely one of those imperfections nobody minds owning up to, something that looks charming in the right circumstances. Being absent-minded. A bad dancer. Partial to a large gin after work. But being pretentious? That’s premier-league obnoxious, the team-mate of arrogance, condescension, careerism and pomposity. Pretension brunches with fraudulence and snobbery, and shops for baubles with the pseudo and the vacuous.

Undoubtedly you’re the sort to take an interest in the world around you. Think about what gets you out of the house at weekends. Is it dirt-biking or brewing craft ales? Maybe bird-spotting, kickboxing, visiting medieval churches, or attending cosplay conventions dressed as Harry Potter. Perhaps it’s art appreciation, bread baking, five-a-side football, astronomy, philately, writing erotic fan-fiction, playing soldiers from the comfort of your couch in Call of Duty, metal-detecting, larping, running, playing darts, keeping goldfish, reading up on Middle East politics, cabinet making, restoring old hi-fi equipment, learning Russian, amateur dramatics, pickling vegetables, cultivating cacti, knitting, learning the clarinet, free climbing, standup comedy, philosophy evening classes, caravanning, consulting the tarot, fly-fishing, yoga, DJing, making ceramic Toby jugs, designing your own clothes, photographing vintage American diners for your Instagram feed, following college athletics, floristry, collecting true-crime books, racing 1970s muscle cars, or watching old silent films. Whatever it is you do, I’ll bet you’d never think it pretentious. That’s because you do it, and pretension never self-identifies.

Pretentiousness happens over there. In the way he writes. In her music taste. In the way they dress. And who hasn’t before described a person, place or thing as pretentious? Right-thinking folk curl up and die if accused of it. Always pejorative, the word “pretentious” is easy shorthand for dismissing novels, plays and movies. It’s used to slag off music, bitch about what a person is wearing or rubbish the decor in a hotel. Scan the culture page in a major newspaper and likely as not you’ll find the word lurking in a film review or opinion piece supporting cuts to arts funding. It is ammunition for apoplectic one-star Yelp.com restaurant reviews and is a character trait strenuously denied in online dating profiles. You can smell it in the air when complaints are made about something being too “arty”, and hear the suck of inevitability as it gloms onto the word “elitist”.

Actor Hugh Grant tells listeners to BBC Radio 4’s Film Programme in 2012 why the films of Jean-Luc Godard are “pretentious nonsense”. Marisa Gerber, reporting on the proper way to pronounce the names of Hispanic neighbourhoods in Los Angeles, discovers that “no one can seem to agree if using the Spanish pronunciation is respectful – or pretentious” (LA Times, 7 May 2013). Theo Hobson declares atheism to be “an ideology that’s pretentious and muddled”. The Italian politician Maurizio Gasparri causes outrage as he tweets that the English are “pretentious pricks” when Italy beat England in the 2014 World Cup. Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Anthony Doerr tells Michelle Dean that he “grew up where to call yourself a writer would be pretentious” Journalist Ruth Dudley Edwards informs her readers that her “prevailing thoughts about the writer Salman Rushdie” are that he is “self-important, pretentious, attention-seeking and ungrateful” (Daily Mail, 19 June 2007). On BBC 5 Live in 2009, Richard Bacon gets to grips with a question that has vexed humanity for centuries: “Is wine over-rated and pretentious?”

Anthony Doerr: 'I grew up where to call yourself a writer would be pretentious' Read more

The pretentious flaws of others affirm your own intellectual or aesthetic expertise. Simultaneously, their fakery highlights the contours of your down-to-earth character and virtuous ordinariness. It is your plain speaking that makes you trustworthy. That person’s pretentious use of words hides the fact that they do not have anything of substance to say.

It is axiomatic that pretentiousness makes no one look good. But pretension is measured using prejudiced metrics. The baselines against which authenticity and pretentiousness are calibrated vary wildly. Antipretension critics conscript words such as “logic”, “reason”, and “the facts”, to make their assessments look objective. The accuser of pretension – naturally thinking themselves to be the real deal, in possession of an educated and discerning mind – believes that somewhere else in the world there is a genuine article that the pretentious thing or person aspires to be, but is falling short of or exaggerating it.

This accuser rarely itemises both what is being aspired to, and just why it is that the subject in question fails to make the grade. When a person decides that a restaurant is pretentious, the “authentic” restaurant to which it’s being compared and the values that provide The One True Restaurant with its bona fides are seldom revealed. The tendency is to understand it as the cousin of affectation, one of the dark arts of charlatanry. To be pretentious is to be deceitful, untrustworthy. If a book on pretentiousness is deemed pretentious, no example of a plain-speaking, salt-of-the-earth study of the topic will be given. There is no need. Pretension just is.

Pretension sets the amateur against the professional in a game rigged by tradition, qualifications and institutional approval. Puncture the word “pretentious” and out scuttles a bestiary of class anxieties; fears about getting above your station, and policing those suspected of trying to migrate from their social background. The word is bent to fit emotional attitudes towards economic and social inequality, and used as shorthand in arguments over authenticity, elitism and populism. In the arts, pretentiousness is the brand of witchcraft used by scheming cultural mandarins to keep the great unwashed at bay. It’s a way of saying that contemporary art is a “con” and that subtitled films are “difficult” – that they do not appeal to everyone and therefore must be aimed at the sorts of people who think they are better than everyone else.

Arguing about rules, regulations and right or wrong ways of doing things is one way of talking about the amateur and the professional; social categories that make pretentiousness an even knottier issue. The professional is licensed – by training, title, money, time spent – to work in a particular field. They can avoid the charge of pretension because they work in an official capacity. The amateur, on the other hand, might only do a certain thing at weekends or in the evenings, often for free and out of enthusiasm. The amateur doesn’t have the right credentials, so trying to do what the professional does might open them to accusations of being pretentious, of stepping above their station. Pretension is a question of optics: the pessimist sees pretension as a sham. The optimist views it as innocent, tragicomic, an excess of effort.

The pessimist sees pretension as a sham. The optimist views it as innocent, tragicomic, an excess of effort

Saying that a person is pretentious can be a way of calling out the trappings and absurdities of power. It’s a way of undermining the authority that they have positioned themselves with. It is also a way of warning them not to get above themselves. Used as an insult, it’s an informal tool of class surveillance, a stick with which to beat someone for putting on airs and graces. Where the word “pretentious” differs from “pretending” is that it carries with it the sting of class betrayal, especially in the UK, where class is a neurosis as much as a set of social conditions. If being authentic is considered a virtue – what we should strive to be in society – then being pretentious is considered a cover-up, a face-palm to your background.

The horror that class migration evokes in people is almost tribal, as if it is a disavowal of your family and friends. To suggest a person is pretentious is to say they’re behaving in ways they’re not qualified for through experience or economic status. Pretension is tied up with class, which is not just a question of money and how you spend it. Class is about how your identity is constructed in relationship to the world around you, and the resources used in order to do that.

To accuse someone of pretentiousness, of trying to stand out, affirms the fact that you fit in with everyone else. Because pretension is measured against the baseline “norm” of the accuser, there is an assumption that pretension always involves scrabbling up the class ladder. Pretension is taken to be synonymous with snobbery.

Where the word pretentious differs from pretending is that it carries with it the sting of class betrayal

But claims to ordinariness and salt-of-the-earth virtue are themselves pretentious. The assumption that dropping your aitches, asserting a love of cheap lager over a fine wine, or processed cheese over parmesan, will make you seem unspoiled or somehow more gritty, is classic downwardly mobile play-acting. Anti-intellectualism is a snobbery just like anti-pretension; the anti-intellectual is often anxious not to be marked as part of an educated elite, the kind of person that they suspect uses ideas and language to maintain a position of power.

To live in major cities in the west is to be surrounded by claims to authenticity. We’re encouraged to look for the real deal, and not get seduced by the ersatz bloom of pretension. Authenticity is a form of authority; a legitimacy of speech, dress, action. It promises a ticket to the truth. Shops, restaurants, real estate, and a range of leisure activities all promise the bona fide, the genuine, the real McCoy. Being authentic is a virtue and buying into it is a demonstration of financial shrewdness.

In 2015, a billboard advertising hair styling products in Shoreditch, east London, declared that “Pretence is an Offence”. It’s a ham-fisted appeal to a non-existent link between youth and creative authenticity, ignoring the fact that many large cities are theatres of pretension. Buildings imitate architecture from past eras or other parts of the world. Shops and restaurants strive to evoke emotional atmospheres based on historical periods – from back when life was honest and true – to promise an experience in excess of the goods on offer.

Marketing lures consumers – particularly urban, middle-class ones – with games of linguistic pretence. The “home-made”, the “natural”, the “organic”, and the “farm-raised” play on fantasies of our own ecological responsibility in the food we buy, or nostalgia for meals just like your mum probably never made. The natural and organic possess a kind of earthy authenticity, or do the job of stand-ins for other cultures. (In a New York branch of Whole Foods I once saw white asparagus described on the store label as “preferred by Europeans”, as if to suggest that buying it would confer both nutritional value and an appreciation for some misty notion of European sophistication.)

Pretension is a name game. Look at the sizing terms used by Starbucks – grande, venti, trenta – designed to make you think of Milanese coffee bars rather than the grim airport terminal in the Midwest that you’re stuck in. Think of the exotic and romantic evocations named by perfumes and aftershaves – Oriental Lace, Euphoria, La Nuit de l’Homme, Midnight Poison, Possession – or the cod-Latin names that businesses and healthcare providers give themselves for ersatz gravitas. Verizon, Protiviti, Diageo, Novartis, Celera, Hospira, Aetna; these are names designed to make you think of venerable institutions whose company headquarters have neoclassical facades and wood-panelled offices filled with leather-bound encyclopaedias, not bland glass-and-steel buildings in out-of-town business parks.

Car names provide deliciously absurd examples. Ford Aspire, Citroën Picasso, Lincoln Navigator, Honda Element, Austin Allegro, Oldsmobile Starfire, Toyota Highlander, Jeep Renegade, Buick Wildcat, Ferrari Testarossa, Porsche Cayenne, VW Scirocco, Dodge Charger, Chevrolet Cavalier, Plymouth Fury Golden Commando, Vauxhall Tigra, Kia Picanto, Renault Captor, Mitsubishi Shogun. The names are patently ridiculous. Will you become a feudal Japanese general as you do the school run behind the wheel of a Shogun? That’s for you and your grip on reality to decide, but these pretences speak of the powerful lure of lifestyle, of chasing proximity to happiness or prestige (though not in the case of the workaday Shogun).

Will you become a feudal Japanese general as you do the school run behind the wheel of a Mitsubishi Shogun?

The original meaning of the word “prestige” was an illusion or conjuring trick, from the Latin praestigium – a delusion. The delusion is in ever-deferred promises of personal betterment through acquisition. It’s there in advertising campaigns that use the radicalism of a previous era in order to market the products of today – the absorption of transgression and dissidence into just more categories of consumer values. “Because you’re special.” “Because you’re worth it.” Aspiration is the sense of dislocation between our present state and what we hope will make life easier, more tolerable. To close this gap, we play roles that might help us feel we are living a more ideal life. We might close that gap with a hobby, the way we present ourselves on social media, a way of dressing, or in the food we eat. Pretentiousness defines a degree of dislocation between our circumstances and the image we are trying to project.

Tattoos and a Crass band T-shirt no longer, as they once did, mark you out as a person committed to the principles of a radical lifestyle – living in a squat, becoming vegan, rejecting the comforts of convention in order to pursue an alternative vision of society. The westerner who knows the difference between soba and ramen noodles is not necessarily an adventurous traveller, conversant in the cuisine of east Asia. This knowledge can instead be an ostentatious display of tolerance for cultural difference. That Korean bibimbap or “proper” British fish and chips – preferably ordered in a mockney accent – may taste good but it doesn’t make you a better human being.

Style has always been a question of survival in cities. It is a way of navigating other people and carving your own corner. There is pleasure to be had in playing with it. But there is a serious cognitive dissonance between the effort we put into controlling our image and, at the same time, claiming allegiance to transparency and authenticity.

“Cultural omnivores” are what sociologists call those members of the middle classes who can access, participate in, know and feel confident about using a wide range of cultural references – from the popular to the esoteric, from the local to the international. Step out in a vintage Run DMC T-shirt, have lunch at an Ethiopian restaurant, check out an exhibition of Brazilian modernist art, and end the day at a bar styled after a 1920s speakeasy. A genuinely pluralist outlook on life might motivate these interests. But it also speaks loudly to privilege; the privileges of education, travel and leisure time that money allows.

In 2014, the New York-based collective K-Hole – a group of artists operating in the register of a trend forecasting group – published Youth Mode: A Report on Freedom. Youth Mode argued that we live in an era of “mass indie”, the assimilation of once alternative and independent forms of youth culture into the mainstream, and that personal expression through fashion or music taste no longer carries the subcultural weight it once did. One solution to this problem, K-Hole suggested, might be called “normcore”, a strategy of assimilation into different communities rather than demonstrating individual self-expression. Fitting in would be the new standing out. Normcore was misinterpreted at the time as a mandate to dress boringly, to wear Gap cargo shorts or nondescript sportswear, but what K-Hole was driving at was an idea of adaptability, of dressing the part depending on the context.

Class, lifestyle and the judgment of pretension are clearly chained to questions of taste. If what’s pretentious for one person is innovative or enthralling for another, is debating pretentiousness simply just another way of talking about taste? Only up to a point. If the word “pretentious” is used to define a person or thing operating outside the legitimate borders of their class or qualifications, then that’s an operation of socially conditioned taste. This dress or that movie is in “bad taste” because it’s failing to use the right class codes properly. Concepts of taste are too broad to fully explain why pretence triggers such strong cultural allergies. A more specific answer might be found in the adjective “sophisticated”, which often gets paired with “taste” to describe a refined sensibility or liking for complexity.

“The class politics of sophistication are inseparable from its sexual politics,” wrote Joseph Litvak in Strange Gourmets, in 1997. Litvak points out how a glance at the dictionary is all it takes to recall that “sophistication” in fact means “perversion”. For though sophistication might nowadays be defined most readily as “worldliness”, as the opposite of “naivety”, its older meaning, as well as its normative meaning, deriving from the rhetorical aberration known as sophistry, is “corruption” or “adulteration”.

In medieval Latin, the verb sophisticare was used in relation to the dishonest tampering of goods, especially food. At the start of the 18th century, the use of “sophisticated” shifted to mean something deprived of a primitive or natural state. “Unsophisticated” meant something genuine, but shifted to mean a person who was ingenuous or inexperienced. In the 19th century, the idea of something being altered also became associated with wisdom or refinement.

Pretentiousness shares with sophistication a lingering sense of “unnaturalness”; something faked, pretending, tampered with. Litvak presses the idea that sophistication is linked to perversion in the sexual sense, and therefore carries with it a latent homophobic charge. The association of sophistication with a form of urbane and knowing behaviour gets reinforced “every time advertising and journalism, loathing as they do the pretentious and the trendy, derisively dangle before their audience the perennially unpopular figure of the snooty (ie gay) salesman in the upscale boutique.” Pretension implies affectation. People are not acting like themselves, rather, their lying urbanity is trampling all over your plain-speaking truth.

Being pretentious is rarely harmful to anyone. Accusing others of it is. You can use the word “pretentious” as a weapon with which to bludgeon other people’s creative efforts, but in shutting them down the accusation will shatter in your hand and out will bleed your own insecurities, prejudices and unquestioned assumptions. And that is why pretentiousness matters. It is a false note of objective judgment, and when it rings we can hear what society values in culture, hear how we perceive our individual selves.

What we are reluctant to admit is that culture would have no colour without pretension. It would be a lifeless shade of Gap store beige. The doors to imagination would be kept locked tight in fear of finding behind them something that violates the consensus over what is an acceptable creative act, what is an acceptable bar to drink at, what is an acceptable pair of shoes to wear to work.

It’s a Bernini sculpture of a goal, that rivals the Ecstasy of St Teresa, a magisterial hit by an artist Ray Hudson on Ronaldinho

Pretension can be found in all walks of life, and it’s not just wars of values and tastes that are waged with it. It conditions the arts, undoubtedly, but also politics, religion and sport. (Anyone who has enjoyed listening to veteran football commentator Ray Hudson can attest to the imaginative flair of pretentious sports reporting. “It’s a Bernini sculpture of a goal, that rivals the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, a magisterial hit by an artist!” was how Hudson once described a match-winning goal scored by Ronaldinho for Barcelona.) Pretension gets sticky with a mess of unpleasant traits; narcissism, lying, ostentation, presumption, snobbery, selfish individualism. These are not synonyms for each other. The pretentious are also those who brave being different, whether that’s making a stand against creative consensus or running the gauntlet of catching the last bus home on a Saturday night dressed differently to everyone else.

Pretentiousness matters because of what it reveals about how your identity relates to everyone else’s. And hard though it may be to accept, being pretentious is a part of what we do every day. Pretentiousness keeps life interesting. Without the permissions it gives – the licence to try new experiences, to experiment with ideas, to see if you want to live your life another way – people from all kinds of backgrounds will not be exposed to difference, to new ideas or the histories of their chosen field. A rich culture sustained by people who devote their lives to it, often with little reward or recognition, is a pretentious one.

• Pretentiousness: Why It Matters is published on 10 February by Fitzcarraldo Editions

Main illustration: Michael Kirkham/Heart

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