Word: smugness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...kept moving, and he never let his hand get far from his rifle. Concluded Nichols: "Davy Crockett is the epitome of a man who can lick any problem with his wits and his own two hands." In the spring of 1955 the U.S. people were confident, but far from smug. Eisenhower and Dulles had not ended the cold war, nor had the people been lulled into thinking it was ended. What had ceased was the chronic crisis, the futile nail-biting, the frustrated tensions that previously surfaced in such phenomena as the pro-and-con McCarthy yawpings...
...work as "a vehicle for Jacobite and High-flying tenets" and Johnson for "crouding" it with such "monstrous words" as "adespotick, amnicolist, androtomy." "Nearly one-third of this Dictionary," added Philologist John Home Tooke, "is as much the language of the Hottentots as of the English." Years later the smug and able Noah Webster observed that confidence in the Dictionary "is the greatest injury to philology that now exists...
...resume of a year's events is predestined to be pretentious. And when this compendium is made at an institution with a three-hundred year history, the result turns out self-centered and smug as well. It is easy to see, then, why the prospect of reviewing the year has always held irresistible attraction for CRIMSON senior editors as they prepare to retire from the journalistic hurly-burly...
...yesterday's City Council order driving the buses out of Harvard Square is any barometer, this season is a bad one for machines. For years, people have been looking on with smug approval as their mechanical creations grew bigger and, if not better, at least more complicated. Now, however, the machines have been getting smug themselves, and quite a few people have been growing just a little alarmed. William Faulkner, for instance, last week published a letter in the Times decrying the way airplanes now fly, and fall, themselves. The Council order shows the tide of reaction has reached even...
...Congress leaders ratified Nehru's choice, which makes Dhebar's election a certainty. But they were still a little apprehensive. They know that Nehru believes the party to be flabby, smug and out of contact with the masses-and that Nehru is counting on U. N. Dhebar, the austere militant, to rectify these conditions. The party leaders know that they themselves are flabby and smug, but they want to stay that...