Word: smugness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...things are more frustrating than a vending machine that sits in smug silence after gobbling a harried human's coins. Michael DeNardo of Cranston, R.I., is not one to put up with such machinations. When an automaton at the foundry where he worked failed to produce the requested coffee, and the coin-return lever offered no peaceful settlement, DeNardo belted the contraption...
...rape victim, I am encouraged to see that someone is actually making progress in seeing that sex offenders won't continue to walk out of courtrooms with smug grins on their faces [April 2]. It's bad enough to suffer the humiliation of rape, but twice as bad to suffer the degradation of a court system and lawyers who regard the offender as the injured party...
Oliver Wendell Holmes, wounded three times in the Civil War, used to thunder a century ago about "this smug, oversafe corner of the world . . . a little space of calm in the midst of the tempestuous, untamed streaming of the world," so far removed from most human want and anguish. That has not changed much over the past decades. But now it is changing. Scarcity is catching us, and we would probably be one of the first nuclear battlegrounds if restraint ever fractured...
...government programs to combat it. He claims that the U.S. government and academics, liberals and conservatives have approached the poverty backwards, once they discovered that the problem existed. Uninterested in poverty relief until 1950, the U.S.'s sudden fascination with the problem at that point stemmed from a smug feeling of post-war cultural and economic supremacy combined with the belief that poverty opened doors for communist take-over...
...modern world appalled her: "One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience." There was nothing smarmy or smug about her religous convictions. She found "external faults" with the church...