English edit

Etymology edit

pageant +‎ -itis

Noun edit

pageantitis (uncountable)

  1. An enthusiastic rise in the popularity of pageants.
    • 1907 July 31, “2nd Battalion Notes”, in St. George's Gazette, volume XXV, number 295, London, page 107:
      Aldershot has, in common with other places, had its little spasmodic attack of pageantitis. On the 9th and 10th inst., a grand military pageant and tattoo took place in the grounds of Government House.
    • 1908 May 27, “The Kaiser Catches Pageantitis”, in The Bystander, volume XVIII, number 234, London, page 439:
      The Kaiser has condescended to catch from us an attack of pageantitis, and it broke out in Alsace-Lorraine the other day, when his Imperial Majesty inaugurated, with mediæval pomp and circumstance, the restored Hohkönigsberg, near Schlettstadt, in Lower Alsace.
    • 1908 September 26, “Beauty Shows”, in The North-China Herald and Supreme Court & Consular Gazette, volume LXXXVIII, number 2146, Shanghai, page 770:
      Pageantitis has reverted to an old form at the seaside watering places. Beauty shows have become quite a common attraction ....
    • 2007, Jane Tesh, A Hard Bargain: A Madeleine Maclin Mystery, Poisoned Pen Press, →ISBN, page 103:
      "Madeline, can't you do something about the proliferation of pageants in these parts? Everywhere I look, a queen is springing up. Those wretched friends of yours! They must be stopped. What do you call them? Pageantitis? Pageantniks? Idiots, I say idiots!"
    • 2007 June 26, Deborah Sugg Ryan, “'Pageantitis': Frank Lascelles' 1907 Oxford Historical Pageant, Visual Spectacle and Popular Memory”, in Visual Culture in Britain, volume 8, number 2, Manchester University Press, pages 63–82:
      In 1907 in Oxford a serious outbreak of an ‘affliction of the eye and mind known in professional circles as Pageantitis’ was vividly depicted in a satirical postcard.

See also edit