Word: smug
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...with the Christian Democrats, Kurt Kiesinger's party, and as a president critic of Kiesinger, who took the Chancellorship with a Nazi past, Grass is acting as citizen and not as writer. He has not, however, thrown over his writing desk. The same man who wrote about the "bourgeois smug" and the Onion Cellar in The Tin Drum and about Germany's "economic miracle" and the meal worms in Dog Years is at work in these speeches. Even in the midst of the political area, he can't refrain from telling an occasional story-though quite consciously...
...women were convicted and hanged as witches, and one man was pressed to death beneath large rocks for refusing to plead. The tradition holds that the executions were the result of a repressive fanaticism in the Puritan character. Underlying this modern attitude toward the Salem trials is a smug belief that since we do not now believe in the power of witchcraft, the existence of witchcraft is a delusion, as impossible and unscientific, say, as the Ptolemaic notion that the sun revolved around the earth...
...fill the current American prescription for a tragedy with a pain-killing happy ending, it should be made clear that Cheever means by his four "wonderfuls" very much the same bitter things conveyed in the famous five "nothings" of King Lear. There are no dizzy precipices edging the smug suburban surface of Bullet Park. There is, however, the "portable abyss" of the commuter's 7:46 a.m. to Grand Central...
...known sports" tournament in which marbles, for reasons now obscure, became the dominant contest. By the 1700s the marble tournament had become an annual Good Friday ritual in Tinsley Green. The tourney began in the morning; at high noon (the hour Sussex taverns open), the referee cried "Smug!" and the tournament ended. The rules are wondrously simple: 49 marbles are placed in the "pitch" (ring) and each member of the competing teams takes his turn at trying to knock one out. Shooting is a thumbs-only proposition-a flick of the wrist constitutes a "fudge" (foul) and disqualifies the contestant...
...York's New York may not be the city that all of its citizens would recognize (going broke on $80,000 a year is still a very special disaster). And the magazine's critics still point to its smug, In-crowd perspective. "New York," says Freelance Writer Leopold Tyrmand, "is to inflatable plastic furniture what the New Yorker is to Chippendale...