Word: smug
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...college years. For most such figures, those were years of outstanding academic achievement, featuring meaningful friendships with influential professors and culminating in attractive fellowships and job-offers in short, just the sort of years that lend themselves, in all but the most prudent hands, to reminiscence of a singularly smug and irritating nature--especially, one might add, to an undergraduate reader...
This aloof decision-making style, coupled with an embarrassing lack of communication, ought to serve as a telling reminder for years to come. Fortunately, there will apparently be no scars of racial conflict to accompany the memories. Harvard, so prestigious and smug., made its equally elite Ivy allies look like bold innovators in this episode. If this sort of leadership affects other issues, Harvard's tradition of excellence will certainly suffer...
...rich residential heart, Back Bay and Beacon Hill, are shady and civilized, block after block of stately 19th century town houses. The symphony and principal museum are among the world's best. Fine colleges help make the city an enormous intellectual hot tub, at once invigorating and smug. Now Boston's boosters can brag about more than old-shoe gentility: over the past decade a decrepit waterfront district has been intelligently transformed into a swank commercial and residential quarter whose centerpiece, the Faneuil Hall-Quincy Market showplace, draws natives and tourists by the millions. At the other...
Jenkins, by contrast, rarely spoke up. According to a recent poll, the public considered Owen intelligent, businesslike, fair and honest. Jenkins was seen as being smug, arrogant and out of touch...
...shorter fiction-may be able to deny or evade this issue. Art is pattern and design, after all, not morality. Or, on another front: a writer must use material, however unpleasant, not weep over or try to correct it. Fine. But those who feel claustrophobic in the presence of smug, self-deluded solipsism may also decide to skip the whole experience. Barth has often been a pleasant guide through the states of his mind; Susan and Fenwick, his alter egos...