When someone pretends to be something they're not, or claims to have a quality or skill they don't actually possess.
From Latin 'praetensus' (stretched before, put forward), from 'praetendere' (to allege, claim). The word entered English in the 1600s and has always carried the sense of a false claim or deceptive appearance.
The phrase 'under the pretense of' reveals something psychological: humans are so skilled at self-deception that we unconsciously use grammatical distance to separate our real motives from our stated ones.
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