Pretentious, moi?

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A Wordlady fan inquired recently about the word "pretentious", and I was surprised to learn that it is much younger than I would have suspected.  Here's the OED's earliest quotation

1832   T. Carlyle in Fraser's Mag. May 382/2   [He] lived no day of his life without doing and saying more than one pretentious ineptitude.

But surely there were pretentious people and things before 1832? What did we call them?

There are many words in this semantic field that are still in common use today: 

affected
artificial 
overblown
ostentatious 
pompous

But there are others that in my opinion deserve a revival for this sense:

flatulent
1863   Notes & Queries 3rd Ser. 4 284   Much of the poetry is little more than very flatulent declamation.

hi cockalorum ("cockalorum" was a magician's incantation like "abracadabra" or "hocus pocus" and thus came to stand for meaningless speech)
1887   Hardwicke's Sci.-gossip Apr. 83/2   The dogmatic hi-cockalorum style of men absolutely certain of their own correctness.

The Scots and Irish apparently have at their disposal

long nebbed (literally, having a long beak; figuratively, inquisitive; of language, polysyllabic)

But I think my favourite is 

coxcombic(al),

(roosters being notorious for being full of themselves).

Consider this fabulous stream of insults and see if you can think of anyone you would like to apply it to currently:

1879   Reynolds's Newspaper 21 Sept. 3/1   That feeble-minded, self-opinionated, coxcombic mixture of imbecility, assurance and inordinate self-esteem.

SPELLING

"Pretentious" and "pretension" constitute possibly one of the most annoying pairs of words in English. Why is "pretentious" spelled with a "t" whereas "pretension" is spelled with an "s"? 

As we have seen, "pretentious" is a fairly recent addition to English. We borrowed it from French prétentieux which in 1789 or thereabouts had acquired the meaning "making an exaggerated outward display, ostentatious, showy"

"Pretension" is much older in English; we borrowed it from Latin in the 1400s. The classical Latin form was   praetention (the act of pretending) but a post-classical form praetension had cropped up. In the early days we merrily spelled the word with a -tion ending, an -sion ending, or even a -cion ending. Quite frankly, I don't know why the -sion ending won out, but by the 1700s it was firmly established, and it is the only spelling listed in Samuel Johnson's dictionary.

So by the time "pretentious" came along, imitating the French spelling, it couldn't win against the entrenched spelling of "pretension".

If I were Queen of English, I would definitely do something about this. Since there are no current (and very few obsolete) words in English ending in -sious, I would decree that instead of changing pretentious to pretensious,  pretension should be changed to pretention. 

It is true that the following verbs ending in -d  form their derivative in -sion:

ascend ascension
apprehend apprehension
comprehend comprehension
extend extension
condescend condescension
suspend suspension

But on the other hand (God forbid that English should be consistent) we have

intend intention 
contend contention

French lives quite happily with prétention and prétentieux. Why do we have to make our lives complicated? 

Warning: I am not (alas) Queen of English, so you'll have to keep spelling pretension with an s.