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Impertinent vs Bumptious - What's the difference?

impertinent | bumptious | Related terms |

As adjectives the difference between impertinent and bumptious

is that impertinent is insolent, ill-mannered while bumptious is obtrusively pushy; self-assertive to a pretentious extreme.

As a noun impertinent

is an impertinent individual.

impertinent

English

Adjective

(en adjective)
  • insolent, ill-mannered
  • * Tillotson
    • things that are impertinent to us
  • * Jeremy Taylor
    • How impertinent that grief was which served no end!
  • irrelevant (opposite of pertinent)

    • Usage notes

    Although, historically, definition 2 was the original (derived from the French below) usage; meaning gradually changed to definition 1. More recently general usage has come to, once again, incorporate definition 2. As many older speakers will consider definition 2 incorrect, avoiding the word altogether may be advisable. The construction "not pertinent" is one possible alternative.

    Synonyms

    * See also

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • An impertinent individual.
  • * (Maria Edgeworth)
    • comfortably recessed from curious impertinents
    ----

    bumptious

    English

    Adjective

    (en adjective)
  • Obtrusively pushy; self-assertive to a pretentious extreme.
  • * 1877 , (Arthur Conan Doyle), (A Study in Scarlet) :
    • "There are no crimes and no criminals in these days," he said, querulously. "What is the use of having brains in our profession. I know well that I have it in me to make my name famous. No man lives or has ever lived who has brought the same amount of study and of natural talent to the detection of crime which I have done. And what is the result? There is no crime to detect, or, at most, some bungling villainy with a motive so transparent that even a Scotland Yard official can see through it." I was still annoyed at his bumptious style of conversation; I thought it best to change the topic.
  • * 1918 , , The Mirror and the Lamp , ch. 22:
    • From another point of view, it was a place without a soul. The well-to-do had hearts of stone; the rich were brutally bumptious ; the Press, the Municipality, all the public men, were ridiculously, vaingloriously self-satisfied.
  • * 1928 , (Virginia Woolf), :
    • She could stand it no longer. It was full of prying old women, she said, who stared in one's face, and of bumptious young men who trod on one's toes.

    Derived terms

    * bumptiously * bumptiousness