Word: smug
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Settles In. The characters in Thurber's drawings and stories are mostly pre-intentionalists themselves. There is the wife, yelling "What have you done with Dr. Millmoss?" and there is the hippopotamus, looking smug. Inside the hippo, the reader feels sure, is Dr. Millmoss, unhurt (even the Thurber fencer who loses his head is not hurt) but ill at ease, not at all sure he likes being where events have swept him. In his eloquent preface to My Life and Hard Times, Thurber complained of feeling much the same; the humorist, he wrote, "knows vaguely that the nation...
Bert's Pants. Caldwell's special quality is a wonderful ease; he evokes humor or horror without bravura or its opposite, the smug underplaying that leaves the reader, at the end of so many short stories, disappointedly clutching a glazed lump of irony in the form of a souvenir ashtray. Caldwell gives away no pottery. In a leisurely way, yet wasting no time with scene-setting, he lays out his dialogue and his few spare sentences of narration. The characters take shape quickly as the story forms. At the end, amazingly often, what the reader takes away...
...indictment completed, the myth of "Imperial Harvard" stand, much assailed and much lampooned, but nevertheless alive and vital. Harvard is overrated, effete, thin, smug, decaying, but still... What greater tribute than Cunliffe's final sentence: "If I were an American I would want my son to go there...
...this were seriously offered as a motive for the erection of Humphrey Bogart as a culture hero, then this review could be assured of the same uneducated silence that local audiences give to jokes about meat rationing in movies of the 'forties: or acknowledged with the same smug chuckle of the rare undergrad who recognizes the reference to "red points" for what it is, and hoarsely tells his neighbors of his knowledge. But the unashamed hilarity that attends the Bogart festival at the Brattle is indicative that the greatest part of the audience is as ignorant of their escape into...
Usually the show's run is extended, sometimes for half a year or more. But customers who avoid doctors and insurance men, do not attend union meetings, and are past college age, resent having to pay the regular onefer price. Did the smug type in the next seat, the onefer buyer wonders, get his wholesale...