Word: smugly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Kiley is marvelously intuitive in the role, capturing both the smug vanity and simultaneous vulnerability of literature's seedy hangers-on. In A.V. Laider, Kiley is a prescient palmist who foretells the death of four people riding in a railway coach. Or does he? Beerbohm is having a little fun with the old writer's problem of illusion and reality. Neither story is much more than an attenuated anecdote told over brandy and cigars...
...Berger, 42, perhaps America's leading religious sociologist, first won attention with The Noise of Solemn Assemblies, a trenchant attack on the smug, conventional Protestant churches of the 1950s. Back then, Berger reminded the ecumenical leaders last week, he and other critics seemed to be "banging against the locked gates of majestically self-confident institutional edifices." The situation could not be more different today. In the years since, said Berger, Protestants have suffered a failure of nerve and are wallowing in "masochistic self-laceration" or "hysterical defensiveness." He bluntly told the ecumenists that their efforts to regroup...
...powerful than Abbie Hoffman! Faster on the guff than Bella Abzug! Able to leap Baron Munchausen in a single bound! It's Supercop Jack Muller, the Chicago letter-of-the-law man who for 25 years has been causing pain and embarrassment to that city's politicians, smug elite and privileged hoodlums...
...feelings of inferiority, the supposed unfitness of his whole platoon. The campaign to make Calley into stupid sub-human reached its absurd climax three weeks ago in an essay by William Styron in the New York Times Book Review in which Styron compares Calley to Eichmann, and with this smug analogy, casts the full blame on him for what happened...
...city "like a wedding party with nothing but bridesmaids." Upon discovering caviar, Esther consumes a pound or so at a magazine luncheon, paving her plate with chicken slices and smearing on the high-priced spread. But she knows that the whole enterprise is phony, that the girls are smug and dumb and, most important, that she is going against her own grain by participating at all. Before heading back to Massachusetts, she flings all her expensive, uncomfortable new clothes from the roof of her hotel...