Word: smug
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...What ever happened to the scarlet letter?" has become a major despairing theme of conservative political commentary. (Or, "Values, shmalues," as America's leading value peddler, William Bennett, summarized the apparent new culture consensus to the New York Times recently.) Social conservatives used to be smug populists who tarred their critics as out-of-touch elitists. Now they shoot furious thunderbolts at the formerly all-wise American people. Although the dismay of the sanctimony set is enjoyable to watch, their despair may be somewhat misplaced...
...pleasant to watch the Republicans in deep distress, but we can't be smug [about the elections]," he said...
...pompous professor. My senior year in high school, I wrote an essay on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in which I boldly asserted that one of the novel's characters, Ras the Exhorter, was based on the real-life black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey. I remember feeling the smug self-satisfaction that comes with crafting (what I thought was) an original academic argument. I excerpted the essay on my Harvard application. I wondered--only half in jest--whether it was publishable...
While Bridget spends the holidays trashing the Smug Marrieds who are giving a party, O'Faolain spends her Christmas walking and reading alone and envying the married friends she visits, "laughing and talking in bed...and when the clock goes off in the morning, they start again, talking to each other. What happened to me?" she asks, and answers...
...lost its mandate, its vision, and numerous editors," wrote Richard Blow in last December's issue of The Washington Monthly. "It has become smug and cynical--the embodiment of much that is wrong with political journalism today...