Role playing, performing our parts, is what we do; we can hardly blame one another for playing roles. Suppose, however, the role is flavored in such a way that the player can be described as pretentious. We all pretend, but that does not make us pretentious, or even pretenders in a bad sense, or in the way of Bonny Prince Charley. Pretension can take the form of adopting a style of something you aspire to be, and may eventually be, but are not there yet – thus the grad student who postures as a prof. A variant version has the middling prof posturing as a prof of importance. He differs from the grad student because his case holds no promise of the pretense ever converging with reality. The third in the series is the prof of importance who postures as a prof of importance.

Unlike the first two examples, the prof of importance is playing a role he is entitled to play and is claiming a status he actually occupies, but in a way that reveals him to be too taken with the station life has assigned him. We can imagine a person exuberantly delighting in his high station who is not pretentious. It takes more than just loving his role to make the prof offensive. This pretentious person's delight is a smug delight. He is self-satisfied; he puts on airs, and we feel he is full of air, usually hot, a stuffed shirt, overinflated.