Word: smugness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
While we cannot afford to be smug about the present situation, we do not need to be apologetic either. We are continuing to attempt improvements within the limits of our resources and energy. If this be stagnation, Heaven save us from activity. Henry Hatfield, Chairman, Germanic Languages and Literatures...
...with the firm, they try to set him up with a neighbor widow, they try to reform him; they fail, of course. He makes sausages out of plastic hose at the plant, devastates their garden party, and transports their son on his fuming motorbike. The characters, in their smug posturings and ridiculous appearance, are like cartoon characters, as the film itself is a plotless continuity of cartoon-like situations. It is one of the funniest bunches of cartoons ever assembled...
...Greek Furies themselves still hunt the criminal down, until he is able to convert an Orestes-like fleeing from doom into a Christian pursuit of salvation. Against this search for light are placed things blind and self-centered in contemporary life-a mother's passionate willfulness, a smug family's hush-hush gentility...
This battle of the sexes was not won without a struggle. "Pregnant preachers would be unseemly in the pulpit," said some of the traditionalists when the subject came up at the church convention last year. "Less so than fat, smug male priests," countered the feminists. When the convention vetoed the reform, the press kept up the pressure until Parliament convened a special church assembly of 45 clergymen and 57 laymen to reconsider the matter. When it came to the vote last week, it was 69 to 29 for the women...
Flops & Switches. Failures came often enough to keep the bootstrap-tuggers from getting smug. Tax exemption means nothing if profits are nothing, and 169 factories (of the 667 that started) have gone under for such reasons as obsoletion of market, lack of distributing facilities, attempting to make a product exclusively for the still relatively small Puerto Rican market. The government, too, had its failures. The Land Authority tried valiantly, even mechanized sugar loading by a system that blows the semirefined product from trucks or railroad cars., into ships, eliminating bags. But it could not meet its allotted task of increasing...