stuffed shirt

• stuffed-shirt

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stuffed shirt (plural stuffed shirts)

1. (idiomatic, informal) One who is pompous or self-important, especially one who is officious in a position of authority.
   • 1914, Samuel Hopkins Adams, chapter 30, in The Clarion‎:

     "Don't you come the high-and-holy on me. You and your smooth, big, phony stuffed-shirt of a father."

   • 1941, Herman J. Mankiewicz, Orson Welles, Citizen Kane (motion picture), spoken by Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), RKO Radio Pictures:

     Bernstein, am I a stuffed shirt? Am I a horse-faced hypocrite? Am I a New England school marm?

   • 1944, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter 5, in The Razor’s Edge […], 1st American edition, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., →OCLC, section ii, page 208:

     Oh? I remember, you came to Chicago once. Bit of a stuffed shirt, aren't you?

   • 1952 May 26, “Medicine: Mind Matters”, in Time‎, archived from the original on 2012-12-01:

     Dr. Laughlin was the only one in a movie party who detested the second male lead—"I regarded him as overserious, pedantic, a stuffed shirt."

2. (usually hyphenated) Used attributively.
   • 2000 July 10, Frederik Balfour, “Return of a Hong Kong Highflier”, in BusinessWeek‎:

     The opportunistic style that was the bank's trademark still prevails and continues to attract talented young Hong Kongers looking for an alternative to the stuffed-shirt culture of most U.S. and European banks.

• empty suit

• “stuffed shirt”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.