Word: smug
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...public disgust. If only curiosity, interest, some attention could be drawn to them. Perhaps through the book--The gavel of the magistrate raps fiercely on the desk. Even in the eyes of the law she is pushed aside. A smile of satisfaction spreads over the phlegmatic features of smug, heartless mankind. Cruel humanity plods on, its head high, leaving its poor sisters by the wayside, alone, out of the limelight. Was ever an abnormality dismissed with such an insulting lack of curiosity...
...Bumble: Character in Dickens' Oliver Twist. Smug, self-righteous, disagreeable, he is the beadle in the orphan asylum at which Oliver disgraced himself by asking for "more." It was Mr. Bumble who christened Oliver, as follows...
...apply for an injunction restraining Inveresk Ltd. from interfering with his conduct of their paper. Since the editor had a contract, the only thing to do was buy him off. He held out last week for ?12,000-nearly $60,000-and finally got it. Wherefor the smug airs, the sherry...
From the kaiser-by-grace-of-god who declared in 1905: "We are the salt of the earth," to the American Bar Association committee on citizenship who quite recently formulated a credo: "I believe that we Americans have the best government that has been created" smug pride of nation still persists, but it is steadily and increasingly challenged by Jeremiads such as Spengler's Decline of the West, Einstein's scorn of U. S. intelligence, Siegfried's despair of U. S. materialism. Just how science and the machine have affected civilization; just what the possibilities are of self-destruction, "decline...
Occasional perusal of the editorial columns of the Boston Transcript should be sufficient to familiarize any reader with such characteristics of that paper as political prejudice or smug contempt for new and radical ideas. No one is surprised to see Transcript editors acclaim as inspired every word which issues from a Republican month, dismiss with a shrug the work of advanced political thinkers, or threaten the country with imminent ruin from communist machinations. But complete as the conservative and reactionary attitude of the Transcript may usually be, it is still able on occasion to surprise the most constant...