Word: smug
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...less than a month away, and the primary races on both sides are heating up. At Harvard, signs of Obamamania and Huckapalooza are everywhere. Sort of. To be sure, our various species of political animal have come out of hibernation: the detached prognosticators, the spit-shined climbers, the smug ignoramuses. The College’s political energy has actually been kind of underwhelming. And some members of the Class of 1967 are hopping mad about it. They’re so fed up with our general political disengagement, in fact, that they took to drastic measures: no less...
...There are, Faraway Tree aside, two cases in which awareness campaigns are neither useless nor self-interested. For underreported incidents like rape, campaigns are a reasonable method to spur more reporting. Events like Take Back the Night, however smug or shrill, may in fact be serving a useful purpose. For crucial public health measures too—the shortage of Asian bone marrow donors comes to mind—such campaigns might also be helpful...
...full of himself. It takes only a tiny shift in perception before everything a person does can be misconstrued. Just like that, the assets Affleck had relied on became liabilities. His spirited antics began to look oafish. Instead of being witty and wry, he came across as smug. And all of it became media fodder. In the words of one movie critic (O.K., Time's Richard Corliss), he was "a commodity that gets consumed in checkout lines" rather than in a cinema. Every decision he made appeared to be exactly the wrong...
...neglected to cultivate a Ralph Waldo Emerson he could count on for a warm bath and square meal when he really needed them. And despite the best efforts of Emile Hirsch, there's something annoying about him, too. He's too secure in his self-righteousness, too smug in his conviction that his is the only viable path to self-fulfillment. A lot of the dropouts he encounters on his way offer less radical alternatives to a life within the system. Theirs might not be your way, or mine, but they all seem reasonably content - a couple of jumps ahead...
...read "The Gray Wars" with smug amusement. When my glorious mane of auburn hair started turning gray more than 15 years ago, I tried to maintain it artificially and was mortified by the black-and-purple results. I had it hacked off, and that was the end of the bottle for me. Boomers need to realize that if we fulfill our life expectancy, we will be gray much longer than we were brunet, blond or auburn. Embrace the silver. People will choose to be around you if you are adventurous and love life. You can't buy that...