Word: bumptiously
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When he named Sununu his chief of staff shortly after the 1988 election, Bush handed the ultimate insider's job to a bumptious outsider with a chip on , his shoulder: a double-hyphenated Lebanese- and Greek-American, born in Havana with a funny name. Bush pointedly ignored the protests of such close advisers as Secretary of State James Baker, leading the Washington establishment to conclude that he had "done another Quayle." Sununu was obviously brilliant: a three-term Governor of New Hampshire and former engineering professor with an IQ estimated at 180. He had been an invaluable political asset, rescuing...
...said that whatever the provocation and even justification for attacking Panama, there would be a price to pay abroad. That message meant at least as much to Bush as the gloating of his political advisers over the payoff at home. To his credit, he seemed genuinely embarrassed when the bumptious Republican National Committee chairman Lee Atwater rushed to treat Noriega like Willie Horton, the murderer and rapist whose mug shot figured so prominently in the 1988 campaign -- a bad guy that good Americans love to hate...
...baby-boom, back-bench Senator from Indiana, represented a bold leap across generational boundaries. Bush, it seemed, had looked in the mirror and found what was most needed in the second-banana role that he had played for eight years: a younger version of himself. Quayle radiates the same bumptious enthusiasm, the same uncritical loyalty, the same palpable gratitude and the same malleable mind-set that Bush brought to the G.O.P. ticket...
...solitude is lifted. There are six seats on the train for seven weary bodaahs. Curtains, stagehands, producers are all nonfunctioning. Taylor is terrified that he won't have enough money to pay for tickets home. He constantly feels insufficient as a leader and fearful that his dancers are bumptious slobs. He even cuts one of his men's hair at an airport. The dancers give as good as they get. At one acrimonious dinner in Spoleto, Italy, they accuse him of cheating at cards. He is appalled. Yet they are loyal; no Taylor dancer ever departs to join a rival...
That almost bumptious sense of lese majeste had been established at the outset of the courtship. Though the couple first met on a polo field when both of them were four, their romance was sparked not by a sudden glance or even a heartfelt declaration but, well, by a profiterole actually. The cupid's confection came into play at Ascot last year, when a boisterous Andrew put his arm around Fergie and tried to stuff the cream-filled cake into her mouth. The girl who last week vowed to obey him winged the pastry back at his royal person...