Max, who has always been pretentiously snobbish, begins to taunt Joe. Remarkably, he is as much himself in the cheerfully meretricious and the pretentiously serious. Fowler was using "elegant" in a then-current pejorative sense of "excessively or pretentiously styled". Gertrude pretentiously flaunts her higher rank and disdains her family's lower social status. The short-robed doctors were bitter because the long-robed physicians behaved pretentiously. Unlike the interior decor, the headhouses were sharply criticized as "resembling mausoleums" and "pretentiously monumental". In the early years it was called, rather pretentiously, "Well Hall Garden City". The upper passage is a tight crawl into the pretentiously named Wembley Stadium. My work has become less pretentiously fake and over the top"".