Word: smugly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...hence it is like no other picture that ever came out of Hollywood. Such things as plot worry Saroyan not at all. People are the grist for his mill, and the Macauleys of Ithaca, Calif, are good grist. Saroyanesquely naive one moment, they are profound the next; now smug and annoying, now simple and lovable. Definitely, they are human beings, and fortunately the story of their day-today, small-town lives is told with few of the irrelevancies that Saroyan usually contrives. There is a characteristic lack of reticence in the telling, but the story survives and prospers...
Meanwhile a grey-haired courtier with "wrinkled visage, deep-set eyes . . . walked nervously in the gardens" a stone's throw from Will's brothel. The courtier's name was Sir Edward Dyer, known to literati mainly as the author of a rather smug poem called My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is. No one guessed his secret, but for years, says Author Brooks, Dyer had been getting Shakespeare to buy bad plays for him and had rewritten them into the classics we read today. As a gentleman, Dyer had naturally not wanted his name connected with...
Switzerland's Neue Zürcher Zeitung is one of the lonely islands of press freedom in a sea of European press restrictions. A smug, conservative old newspaper NZZ is to the Swiss what the London Times is to Britons. Unfrightened by the fact that Germany is less than 20 miles from Zurich, NZZ dares to tell the truth when it gets mad enough. Mad enough last week, NZZ said...
...those smug, complacent people are playing with human lives! The trickle of beautiful planes comes over and we look up and say to each other: "Just think of what a thousand, five thousand of them could do." You don't feel that; we do. The seamen whose ships have been blown from under them talk of the useless waste because helpless boats are not convoyed. You haven't spoken to such men, I have. The stunned, half-dead sailors adrift for weeks on a raft-you haven't seen them, I have. And "little steel" asks...
...crippled "Arizona" with clouds of smoke pouring out, the narrator months a masterpiece of understatement, ""We were not sufficiently prepared at Pearl Harbor," From then on, the bragging about America's resources and productive facilities, which would have been in keeping with the times six months ago, now seems smug and unwarranted...