Word: prig
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...this basically serious exercise in parody, Maclnnes adopts the young narrator-adventurer common to 18th century fiction. He is one Alexander Nairn, a pushy Scots lad but a bit of a Presbyterian prig. Alexander ships from Liverpool on a slaver carrying blacks from Africa on the final leg of their journey to West Indian sugar plantations...
...authorized one for Irish assassins from Swift to Shaw: the smug face of English hypocrisy, personified in this case by a sanctimonious divorce judge named Sir Toby Routh. His fiercely prudish sermons from the bench drive adulterers to suicide and his wife to drink. He is as pompous a prig as ever rode a Rolls to work and pride to a fall. But the only tumble Miss Tracy gives him is into the downy bed of Gerda Trauenegg, a well-tuned opera singer from Vienna. Catching him with his wig down, Gerda momentarily taps a streak of puritanical lechery...
...girl gave up smoking at the age of eight and almost won a Brigitte Bardot look-alike contest at 12. Now 19, Portland has made her London acting debut in a revival of Oscar Wilde's A Woman of No Importance, playing-of all things-a puritanical little prig. The critics thought she was splendid, and so did Papa James, who announced that henceforth "my ambition is to be known as Portland's father...
Ogden, Chaplin's hero, is no more appealing than the people around him. He comes on as a diplomatic prig, spouting. Moral Rearmament gibberish at a press conference, Socially reserved and emotionally up-tight. He never changes. Although he professes love for Natascha in the last third of the film, there is no sign of any difference in his wooden personality. Chaplin's treatment of the character forces us to question his capacity for love, and look for other less romantic motives for his behavior...
Puck & Pan. He arrived at Cambridge with a scholarship at Trinity. "A shy prig," is his own description; too shy to ask where the toilets were, he walked to the one at the railway station. At Trinity, dons were gargling grace in two alternate systems of Latin pronunciation; the junior dean had to be eased out because, though his sermons were eloquent, he had become crippled by syphilis and had raped his daughter. The master was another kind of monster-a snob. Yet this cloister now housed some of the brightest spirits...