Word: smugly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...around London, the Clash sings straight to-and, in a sense, even speaks for-a generation of working-class kids not only cut off from the social mainstream but disaffected from the smug, cushy sounds of most contemporary pop. Stateside, the audience is different: students, trendy punks, artists and camp followers who cruise the punk periphery like tourists looking to score a season box for the apocalypse. No wonder that, after only the first American date, Joe Strummer was already sounding a little homesick...
...Review, Alumna Gates speaks with horror of her days as a Phi Mu: "The asininity of 'secret ceremonies'; the moronic emphasis upon 'activities' totally unrelated to-in fact antithetical to-intellectual exploration." There was also "the aping of the worst American traits-boosterism, Godfearing-ism, smug ignorance, a craven worship of conformity." Grist for the Gates mill? Never. "To even care about such adolescent nonsense one would have to have the sensitivity of a John O'Hara, who seems to have taken it all seriously." But not while he was in college; O'Hara...
Thanksgiving sometimes runs the risk of sounding smug. The feasting takes place in a world where people die of starvation every day. The self-praises and even the thanks for good fortune are of little use to those who are less fortunate. So if this is a time to give thanks, it is also a time not to take the stored harvest for granted. Americans sense an uncertain and uncontrolled element in their lives. That is evident in the kind of restless discontent that appeared in the off-year elections, not only in the cautious and sometimes contradictory voting...
Such tensions might have destroyed him. Instead, they lent rare power to his fiction. He learned to see two distinct ways of life. One belonged to the smug, narrow, easily shocked circle populated by his mother and her friends. The other possessed his imagination: total friendship, passionate, uninhibited and free, with a like spirit. Artistically, Forster did not want to choose, to become simply a novelist of manners or a poet of pleasures. The motto of his fourth novel, Howards End (1910), captured both the dilemma and the hope: "Only connect...
...Trios Paranoias. "My vision," Lowe says, "is to tease people. I never make a stand, you know, never put my feet down. If I write a love song I'll al ways make fun of it to my friends. As a matter of fact, I'm sickeningly smug. It keeps me out of trouble...