Word: smug
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...nominating convention is sort of Ex-Lax for the body politic, a theater of ourselves, a legitimizing ceremony... We know that what we see is a 'media-event' and are smug in the knowledge. If Walter Cronkite takes it seriously, then we don't have to. His seriousness absolves us. There is a 'media-reality' for which we can disclaim responsibility, and a private reality, which is our watching of the magic show as if it had nothing to do with our lives...
...matter, they still gave me credentials. When I walked out of the room with my pinkcolored "news" tag dangling from my neck, I felt smug. But my confidence was jolted when I got back in the elevator. I was surrounded by a group of newsmen with orange tags, and New York Times picture i.d.'s. A caste system was developing. It wasn't until I was standing in an endless line with the rest of the "special" press for my pass to the floor in the $6.50 bleacher section--where no self-respecting Knicks fan would tread for free--that...
What pleases the Western audiences, apart from the crisp gags, is the smug conviction that California has captured the great Neil Simon and thus is one up on New York. But it is not quite that simple. Simon has not succumbed to California; he has just borrowed it. He asks: "How can I be a turncoat when everything about me-all the baggage I've accumulated since my birth-is pure New York?" In Manhattan, Simon lived in a comfortable East Side townhouse. Now he has a massive electronic gate blocking the entrance to the ten-room house, gardens...
...solar and wind power. But it is aimed not at providing information on an alternative way of doing things, but at creating an alternative world. It represents a new 40-acres-and-a-mule mentality that avoids the problems in cities, education, and American life in general by taking smug refuge in dropping...
...even with prodigal use of those two favorite novelistic themes, drugs and sex, the book remains a heavy-handed and smug treatment of emotionless, sterile relationships and the depravity and violence they engender. The dead babies of the title (and Amis spells this out without much subtlety) are the love, understanding and compassion which the characters of the novel have destroyed with their omniverous desire for pleasurable sensations...