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Re:Pentagon and CIA shaped thousands of Hollywood movies int... by shkkmo on Friday January 07, 2022 @08:42AM (#29838979)
Be careful about trusting Urban Dictionary too much. It can serve has a useful hint about what some slang means, but is often heavily biased towards the slang used by certain demographics and subcultures (and is vulnerable to brigading). It certainly is not a source of the "one true meaning" of a word.

I am sure your language does have a word that is pretty similar to "pretentious" though it may not have all of the conotations. I recommend a real dictionary that has multiple good definitions or a good cross-language dictionary that can give you several alternate words in your language that map to the various uses of "pretentious".

"Woke" is even more complicated. It is a word that originated over half a century ago in African American culture as part of the civil rights movement. It meant being aware of and working to fight racial injustice. It was then coopted a decade ago by progressive people working on a broader range of social justice issues to describe awareness of those issues. It was then further co-opted by conservative people to mock progressive people as pretentious.

The poster is trying to pretend that only this last meaning is real and valid. They are either ignorant or a racist troll working to further the co-opting of the term.

Re:Pentagon and CIA shaped thousands of Hollywood movies int... by tauntz on Friday January 07, 2022 @10:21AM (#29840114)
Thanks for a thorough explanation and background!

I used Urban Dictionary for "pretentious" due to the OP explicitly referring to it to understand the meaning of woke.

But this got me intrigued now :) I still can't think of a phrase or word in Estonian that would convey the same (or even similar) meaning. I searched through a couple of dictionaries now and the translations provided there are really not useful. They mean either "complains a lot" or alternatively "has unreasonably high standards / is high maintenance", "braggy" and "pedantic". And these doesn't sound even remotely close to the English explanation of the word.. at all.

Any fellow Estonians wanna help me out here - is there a phrase or word that would capture the essence of "pretentious" in Estonian? :)

Re:Pentagon and CIA shaped thousands of Hollywood movies int... by shkkmo on Friday January 07, 2022 @10:57AM (#29840593)
"Braggy" and "pedantic" do share some meaning/conotation overlap with "pretentious" but I don't think "complains a lot" or "has unreasonably high standards" really overlap (though terms for those may in Estonianl.

Another English word that is very similar in meaning is "ostentatious".

If I had to write out my own definition of "pretentious" it would be: Pretending to be higher class, more refined, more educated or more moral than you actually are and implying that makes you superior to other people.