Word: showoffs
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...then there was Brazil. Ah, Brazil, whose poetry on the ball made all the European varieties of the game look prosaic. They emphasized the sort of showoff individual skill and creativity that most European training regimes had knocked out of their youngsters by the time of adolescence, creating a giddy and melodic form of the game (personified by the young Pele) in which players routinely did the unpredictable - shooting from 40 yards out; scoring with their backs to goal via an overhead kick; running over the ball to fake out an opponent; as a matter of course taking defenders...
...only seen hieroglyphs in them." Morocco saved him from the abstraction that had weakened French responses to the classic. A painting like his Military Exercises of the Moroccans (1832) shows Delacroix using real life -- the ceremonial charge and fusillade of Arab warriors, rearing on their explosively energetic mounts like showoff bikers doing wheelies -- to recall the truth of energy and immediacy that people must have seen in marble battles 2,000 years before...
...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...