Word: smug
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...have become so supersaturated with the confinement imposed by the four year away of his Alma Mater that he takes particular pains not a subject himself to any in the future. Be the reason for this astoundingly grand percentage of undiscovered criminality what it may, it will engender a smug feeling in the graduate who realizes he receives with his diploma a practically guaranteed refusal of admittance from every penitentiary in the country...
...themselves. Another novelist places these unfortunates low in the scale by declaring them to be a race of rather nasty people, seeking primarily to satisfy their lowest impulses. A foreign writer glances across the ocean and through the haze of three thousand miles deduces that they are prigs, smug claimants of virtue where no virtue exists. A recent visitor to Boston pronounces them a lazy people, desiring luxury and case. And their most consistent critic declares that they are guilty of all the foregoing charges and a great many more; as many, to be precise, as he finds necessary...
...grotesque. College is just one great big democracy where all the little boys and girls run track every afternoon or get well sneered at, and deservedly, too. The caption writers on college films, with the exception of Yale's Greatest American Wisecracker, Donald Ogden Stewart, are as smug and healthy as Lifebuoy. Clean, upstanding, virile, they preach the doctrine of mens sana in corpore sano, and in so many words, too. And they are as humorless as they are smug...
...only occasion upon which Mr. Hays' "heart touch" seemed forced is when photographed with filmdom's buffoons-Ben Turpin, Buster Keaton. The dictator of the fourth largest industry possibly meditates upon a smug lawn and a White House in Washington-then sighs, returns to work. After all, he is a president. And, withdrawn from politics, he has become an unselfish deus ex machina to the movies, a veritable polychromatic Pollyanna...
...morning down Washington's broad, smug streets glide sleek gleaming Rolls-Royces, lean sport cars, great grey-lined limousines. Liveried chauffeurs pull up gracefully in front of buildings gay or sombre with grey, blue, green, yellow, black, purple, red-flags of varied designs. Out step pompous diplomats, flick imaginary dust from immaculate morning coats, stride self-conciously up their embassy walks with top-hats a-glinting in the morning sun. Ah!-to be a diplomat! Last week Don Juan Riano y Gayangos, dean* of all Washington diplomats, Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of His Most Catholic Majesty Alfonso XIII...