Word: smug
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Smug Broadwayfarers learned last week that the shoguns of the show world, principally the Brothers Shubert, Albert Herman Woods, William A. Brady, Arthur Hammerstein, had bickered among themselves, had dickered with one David R. Hochreich, president of Vocafilm Corporation of America, makers of a talking picture device that theretofore had been obscured by Movietone (parade music, gunfire) and by Vitaphone (Ben Bernie, tapdancing, Frances Williams). Unofficially, the newspapers said that Hochreich and the theatre shoguns had made a deal: Hochreich to receive money, the producers the rights to his invention...
...spring flowers to enhance the loveliness of Claire, a young girl adoring. For all her wax-figure delicacy Claire breathes, gently, and harbors surprisingly virile passions. She does not like, she adores, Laura, the sister-in-law with whom she lives, and protects her with passionate devotion from the smug mediocrity of her gentleman-farmer husband. His shortcomings are only too blatant for his sensitive sister Claire, but not for Laura, a duly admiring wife. When Claire discovers the needlessness of so deftly protecting Laura, she turns to another sister-in-law, widowed by suicide. She hopes somehow to atone...
...Smug & Secure...
...greatest danger which faces Rotary today is that we Rotarians, so smug and secure economically, feel that by simply belonging to the Rotary Club, we are discharging our obligations. Rotary was never meant to be a smoke screen behind which we could hide from our civic duties. . . . Adulation for the word 'service' has become almost nauseating. . . ." This brief brave speech was made in Asbury Park, N. J., by the second vice president of Rotary International, whose name is Leonard T. Skeggs. The president of Rotary International is Arthur H. Sapp...
Significance. Thus in a series of excessively droning monologues Lowell Schmaltz gives himself away to inconceivably long-suffering audiences as a self-satisfied ass thriving in a smug over-convenient America, 1928 model. Lively audiences yawn, groan, escape him, but posterity, trapped by the author's undeniable virtuosity in the spoken word, will listen and believe that the mechanistic ass was typical of the age. And posterity may not detect this flaw: "typical" American butter-and-eggers idolized in Lindbergh all the heroism which their own ready-to-wear existence lacked, and would always prefer a Lindbergh...