Word: smirking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...irony. For some 30 years--roughly as long as the Twin Towers were upright--the good folks in charge of America's intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously. Nothing was real. With a giggle and a smirk, our chattering classes--our columnists and pop culture makers--declared that detachment and personal whimsy were the necessary tools for an oh-so-cool life. Who but a slobbering bumpkin would think, "I feel your pain"? The ironists, seeing through everything, made it difficult for anyone to see anything. The consequence of thinking that nothing...
...Today, the stars of Cats & Dogs not only speak, they can wink, frown and smirk in full-bodied performances. On the set, a trainer gets a real beagle to jump through the air. An animatronic stand-in takes the fall. The face-replacement process gives the pup a surprised expression, and the shots are digitally sewn together. What's more, the animals look fabulous. For Mr. Tinkles, "we had to make 14 million 3-D hairs hold form and maintain volume," says Rhythm & Hues' Bill Westenhofer...
Evil drops in with that surprising air of nonchalance and swagger that Satan affects at the start of the Book of Job, when the sons of God come to present themselves before the Lord, and the Lord says to Satan, "Whence comest thou," and Satan, with his evasive, insinuating smirk, replies, "From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down...
...first column, just a couple weeks after Bush took office, I wrote that it would take time before we would come to know Bush’s team as we knew Clintons. Now, four smirk-filled months later, we are comfortable enough with the whole clan to mention them in casual conversation, recognize them on television and even refer to our Defense Secretary (a grown man, no less) as “Rummy.” After four months, what have we learned...
...Bush accepting his honorary degree at Yale, I sensed a Dukakis moment. I understand that the overall effect of the speech, if you were there in New Haven, was not as embarrassing as the soundbites. I saw only the television clips, and they were painful - the towel-snapper's smirk, the jokes about how if you are a C student you may get to be president, and if you drop out (as Dick Cheney did) you get to be vice president, and about not being able to remember everything that happened to him at Yale. The effect was not endearing...