The Rice University Neologisms Database

exclusively male: a charlatan; one who acts or behaves in such a way as to foster a false personal image; a pretentious man Type of Formation: compound derivation (pos [put/place] + er [noun-making suffix] translating into the reflex sense “one who places himself/herself,” thus the metaphorical extension to our contextual meaning can easily be reconstructed.) Possible Reason Used: The use of this word is due in large part to the connotative value of the term and the accuracy with which it defines a subset of males. The term elicits mental correlations with professional posers and the values associated with them: models and vanity, actors and role-playing, conmen and deception, all under girded by a recurrent theme of impermanence and falseness. This idea of shallowness is the seed of analogy that the term poser, as a disparagement is built. It is interesting to note that this usage is not entirely novel, the Oxford English lists a the following entry for poser: Poser (n.) One who poses or attitudinizes And includes the following quotation from 1888, which in large part agrees with our statement of contextual usage: 1888 Pall Mall G. 24 Dec., Besides the professional posers of the studio there are…the posers of the Row, the posers at afternoon teas, the posers in politics, and the circus posers. To this we might be compelled to added the posers at the mall, the posers in the weightroom, the posers in the classroom. (Note that the quotation does not explicitly reference male or female, a semantic narrowing of the original.) It is doubtful, however, that users of this term in the observed speech community are aware of this synonymous older form, or have patterned their usage after it, at least not directly or consciously.