Word: smug
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...admirers I feel bound publicly to criticize the absurd caricature of Professor W. C. Abbott set forth in the October 19th copy of your paper. Of his fondness for milkshakes and black canes, I know little and care even less. Perhaps his generosity to the blind newsdealer offsets his smug self-complacency. But to dismiss his contributions to historical scholarship and his activities as a teacher as "dull" or trivial shows a singular ignorance of the former, and a failure to appreciate the real wisdom underlying his teaching methods...
...quite as inexcusable. The temper of a nation which demands from its newspapers photographs of women in the electric chair presents a curious problem in psychology. Until it is solved, Harvard must assure those who enter its jurisdiction that they shall be not more than normally exposed to this smug and witless barbarism...
Playwright Sturges, no O. Henry, no Conrad, has ordered his parts to diminish the suspense, not to heighten it. With a technic calling for smart treatment, he has used it on the simplest possible problems, the simplest types of characters: the sentimental bully, Spencer Tracy; busy, smug, clean-toothed Colleen Moore; wickedly beauteous Helen Vinson; the caddish son Clifford Jones. Like Producer Lasky, Colleen Moore was making a comeback too, hers after a four-year absence from films. She and Spencer Tracy, their emotions confined largely to work and sorrow, gave performances rated by Manhattan critics as "inspired." Before last...
...Warner). "We see clearly that overproduction of musical films is coming quickly ... as a result of the fact that 42nd Street has broken box office records: therefore, after Cold Diggers of 1933, we will produce no more musical feature-length pictures . . . until the imitative craze dies down. . . ." This smug bit of ballyhoo, by Major Albert Warner for Gold Diggers of 1933, would have sounded more sincere if Warner Brothers' current cinemusicomedy had been a less obvious copy of their earlier one. The casts-Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers, Dick Powell, Guy Kibbee, Ned Sparks-are similar. The narrative frameworks...
...month (TIME, Feb. 20), this might have seemed a blessing. Of such critics the superintendents took no direct notice last week. But they were girded to fight, most of them agreeing, however reluctantly, with a Wisconsin superintendent's statement: "The teaching profession as a whole has been too smug in it? reliance upon universal desire for good schools." Said Dr. Jesse Homer Newlon of Manhattan's Lincoln School: "It is time to smash the tradition that the teacher must be neutral in political matters. . . . They must participate actively as an organized group [more than...