Pretend/Pretentious Relationship

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Phil Smith. I’m in Richardson, Texas, just north of Dallas.

Hi, Phil. Welcome to the show. What’s up?

Hi, Phil.

I don’t have like a fun story. I was just kind of fueled by curiosity.

That’s enough.

That’s great.

So I noticed that there was the word pretend, and it’s kind of fun, but can maybe be insidious, depending on who’s doing the kind of pretending. And then I also found that it kind of shared a prefix with pretension or being pretentious. And I was just kind of curious. I know that there’s some kind of commonality there. And maybe you’re putting on airs or something, but I was curious what the connection was.

Well, they both go back to the same Latin word pretendere, which means to stretch out in front or put forward. And that’s kind of the same idea, if you think about it in both of those words.

If you’re pretending, then you’re putting something out there. You’re putting something forward.

And with pretentious, you know, you’re projecting an image or something like that. It’s sort of like fronting, I guess.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

That’s so cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it’s the idea of reaching out or actually stretching. It goes back to an even earlier Latin word that means to stretch out, and we get the word tendency, which is an inclination to incline.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it stems from Latin to put forth.

Yeah.

Yeah, to reach out, put forth.

How neat.

Yeah.

So it’s beautiful, isn’t it? All those connections.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

And so each one of them took their own path from the original Latin and became a little more speciated or specialized, right?

-huh.

It’s funny that there’s even a connection to fronting, which is similar to pretending, and it even has like a Latin trail to it.

That’s so neat.

Yeah.

When you think about the psychological space that all humans inhabit, a lot of times our language does follow our relationship to the physical space around its front, behind, up, down. And it works its way into the way that our language works.

Philip, I bet you do this all the time.

Yeah, I really do.

That’s kind of what I like about the show. And what I like about language in the first place is that it grows and there’s these cool relationships between really old words and how they grow.

Like I look at new words added to the dictionary or slang words I’m unfamiliar with. It’s really neat to watch language kind of as a whole grow and change.

You guys are doing a service to the English language, not to put on here.

Oh, thank you very much.

Thanks, Phil.

Phil, and thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate it.

Yeah.

Thanks, you guys.

I’ll see you next time.

Take care.

Okay.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

What I love about these words, pretend and pretentious, is that they both have this notion of to act as if something were true.

-huh.

And yet, over the centuries, the millennia, they’ve taken a slightly different angle on that.

So if you pretend, you kind of now have the childhood sense of to act for play or for fun. Make-believe.

Pretentious is about faking something important or highfalutin or fancy, something that’s not an everyday kind of situation, right?

-huh. That’s a good point.

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