Word: showoff
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...true snob is a complex character. He is not merely a status seeker in Vance Packard's sense of the term, or a simple showoff. (Still, touches of artful swank are essential-the polo mallet cast casually onto the back seat of the car, or the real, working buttonholes on jacket sleeves that betray the Savile Row suit.) The authentic snob shows it by his attitude toward his superiors and his inferiors. Gazing upward, he apes and fawns and aspires to a gentility that is not native to him; looking down, he snubs and sniffs and sneers at those...
From this belief stemmed the famous, or infamous, Updike style: tiny things described at great length. Rare is the reviewer over 30 who has not at least once twitted Updike for preciosity and overwriting. Yet he is not a showoff, as critics like Alfred Kazin have sometimes claimed ("a brilliant actionlessness ... the world is all metaphor"). In the service of his intense, precise idea of truth, Updike simply loads some moments in his fiction with more words and significance than they can bear. From a story in the 1960s, describing the fragrance that
...would never have dubbed Frenesa a hot dog, but there's no doubt that people really enjoy watching her play. She's not a showoff! she just has a lot of style...
...dynamics of a hook shot, stresses the importance of practice, describes a high polish. But it says almost nothing important; none of the things that could have been said if he had chosen Connie Hawkins as his subject and talked about what it feels like to be the greatest showoff in the world and what it means when you're not a Rhodes scholar and your knees begin to crumble when you come down with a rebound. McPhee calls basketball a series of "compounding alternatives. Everytime a basketball player takes a step, an entire new geometry of action is created...