Word: prig
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...William Barnie, 54, Scottish science teacher, who wore a prig of white heather in his bathing cap for luck, boasted: "I'm the oldest man ever to swim the Channel, and the first Scotsman...
...inherited income and putters about the suburbs of literature. As the child of zealous Philadelphia Quakers (his father was a glass manufacturer), little Logan fell in love with religion at the age of four and for the next few years became, as he later put it, an "odious little prig" who would clamber aboard horse cars handing out tracts and asking people if they had been saved. Before long he lost his faith; never again would he so thoroughly commit his emotions to an interest outside himself...
Whoop for War. Young Calhoun was something of a prig. When" his admiring brothers persuaded him to give up farming and sent him to college at 20, he worked as hard at Yale as if he were plowing a rocky patch of land. To the frequent ridicule of his fellow students, he would reply that he studied hard "in order that he might acquit himself creditably when he should become a member of Congress...