Obtentious

Some of the best ideas come to me in bed. That is, before I doze off to sleep, you pervs!

Anyway, I was thinking of a word that describes both obnoxious and pretentious people. Mind you, one can be obnoxious and not pretentious and vice versa. So I came up with obtentious. What brought this on, you might ask?

Well, let's go back about 25 years to my second job out of college. I was a reporter for a newspaper that shall remain nameless. This woman, who shall also remain nameless, worked on the advertising side. Let's just say she was trouble from Day 1. Obnoxious AND pretentious!

For our purposes, let's refer to her as "Elise." Elise always wanted to be someone she was not: rich, beautiful, classy. In reality, she was middle-class (oh, the horrors!), average-looking and classless. But she was an excellent actress: She proceeded to ACT like someone rich, beautiful and classy and the rest of us could just pound sand.

Elise would not only polish her nails in the office, she would perch her naked foot up on her desktop while polishing her toesies! I am NOT making this up. She was newly-married to a school teacher but that wasn't good enough for our Elise. She insisted her husband go to law school and became like a wildebeest in her determination to make him into an attorney. I think he had very little say in the matter.

One of her jobs at work was to mark up the ads on the pages (this was before desktop computers). When she was finished she always BELLOWED out my name to come and retrieve the proofs as if I was her personal servant, instead of picking up the phone like a human being and asking nicely. Since she was not my superior, I would just take my sweet old time to go get them.

Fast forward to 2007. I was doing a web search for a client and came across a picture of her on a web site with one of her daughters, named (are you ready for this?) Remy! Can you think of a more obtentious name? (Remy Faith, yet--oy.) Remy is the name of the deli-restaurant where I buy my coffee in the morning. It should NOT be the name of someone's child in America.
And Faith? I hope the kid grows up to be an atheist, just to spite her mother.

How pretentious. How obnoxious. How Elise.