pseudo-sophisticated

Maybe it's because I was raised in Montana where people are people and animals are either food or pets, but this sort of pseudo-sophisticated approach is decidedly subhuman.

ID/Evolution 2009

For instance, my high-school self — skinny, scabby, giggly, gabby, frantic to be noticed, tormented enough to be a tormentor, relentlessly pushing his cartoons and posters and noisy jokes and pseudo-sophisticated poems upon the helpless-high school — strikes me now as considerably obnoxious, though I owe him a lot: without his frantic ambition and insecurity I would not now be sitting on (as my present home was named by others) Haven Hill.

john updike | march 18, 1932 – january 27, 2009 « poetry dispatch & other notes from the underground 2009

Out in the suburbs we irony-soaked, pseudo-sophisticated teenage boys could only roll our eyes at the tut-tutting.

Read This Review or . . . Andrew Ferguson 2010

For instance, my high-school self — skinny, scabby, giggly, gabby, frantic to be noticed, tormented enough to be a tormentor, relentlessly pushing his cartoons and posters and noisy jokes and pseudo-sophisticated poems upon the helpless-high school — strikes me now as considerably obnoxious, though I owe him a lot: without his frantic ambition and insecurity I would not now be sitting on (as my present home was named by others) Haven Hill.

January « 2009 « poetry dispatch & other notes from the underground 2009

The intervener is of the view that “[p] olice officers must engage young people during the explanation of their rights because people afflicted with learning disabilities use pseudo-sophisticated language, even when they do not understand the nature of what is being explained to them” [Factum atpara22].

L.T.H. v. Her Majesty the Queen: A Forecast : Law is Cool 2008

All the usual Peter Temple ingredients are here: the writing is fabulous, so evocative of Melbourne life as Jack knows it, poetic and spare in its mourning for the old ways that are fast being swept away by the pseudo-sophisticated and flashy, bland “multiculturalism”.

Sunday Salon: Black Tide Maxine 2007

All the usual Peter Temple ingredients are here: the writing is fabulous, so evocative of Melbourne life as Jack knows it, poetic and spare in its mourning for the old ways that are fast being swept away by the pseudo-sophisticated and flashy, bland “multiculturalism”.

November 2007 Maxine 2007

Annie, on the other hand, exudes a perpetually adolescent, yuk-yuk obsession with casual sex in the insufferable guise of a pseudo-sophisticated amusement at other people's obsession with sex.

The Matisse of Mad Magazine 2009

All the usual Peter Temple ingredients are here: the writing is fabulous, so evocative of Melbourne life as Jack knows it, poetic and spare in its mourning for the old ways that are fast being swept away by the pseudo-sophisticated and flashy, bland “multiculturalism”.

Sunday Salon: Black Tide Maxine 2007

Mostly I let the pseudo-sophisticated "they're all just as bad as each other" stuff pass.

X-Files: I Want To Believe (2008) Steven Barnes 2008