puffed up with vanity; "a grandiloquent and boastful manner"; "overblown oratory"; "a pompous speech"; "pseudo-scientific gobbledygook and pontifical hooey"- Newsweek
lofty in style; "he engages in so much tall talk, one never really realizes what he is saying"
concerned with effect or style of writing and speaking; "a rhetorical question is one asked solely to produce an effect (especially to make an assertion) rather than to elicit a reply"
of or relating to rhetoric; "accepted two or three verbal and rhetorical changes I suggested"- W.A.White; "the rhetorical sin of the meaningless variation"- Lewis Mumford
making claim to or creating an appearance of (often undeserved) importance or distinction; "a pretentious country house"; "a pretentious fraud"; "a pretentious scholarly edition"
marked by repeated turns and bends; "a tortuous road up the mountain"; "winding roads are full of surprises"; "had to steer the car down a twisty track"
abounding in or given to pompous or aphoristic moralizing; "too often the significant episode deteriorates into sententious conversation"- Kathleen Barnes