Word: smugness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Peter Wexler is a crank. It has something to do with his belief that everybody is a liar or, as he puts it, "smug and self-satisfied and just close enough to the facts to get by." When young Holden Caulfield complained about phonies, it had the force of discovery. Wexler's grownup bitching sounds more than a little gratuitous. Wife Lily breaks the news sweetly: "These aren't great complaints, you know. They're tired, and small, and self-serving, they're vague -- if I weren't wife-of-wives I'm not certain I'd be charmed...
...measure a baseball fan by his boyhood heroes. On the wall behind Fay Vincent's desk is the original artwork from Whitey Ford's 1953 Topps baseball card, a talisman of the bygone era when the New York Yankees symbolized success, stability and smug superiority. If Joe DiMaggio personified grace, and Mickey Mantle represented God-given talent, then Ford, the gritty little lefty ace of the pitching staff, was guile elevated to Hall of Fame standards. This quality is not lost on the baseball commissioner, who says with reverence, "He had the greatest pick-off move to first...
...year, Smith's students feel confident, if not smug, about their grasp of the world. "I used to hear about countries on television and think they were over there somewhere. I hadn't heard of half of them," admits Leila Nesson. "Now I can figure out better what's going on in the world. I'll always know that Angola is in Africa and not just over there somewhere." Says Eleanor Pries, as she examines her final map: "We saw our originals and we just laughed...
...completely mute. To keep myself from panicking, I imagined that I wasn't in an interview with 10 Harvard students smug in their knowledge that they knew so much more than me. I pretended I was a bird, soaring well overhead, flying free and fast and far and aiming my excrement right on the tops of their heads...
...Americans to run to the barricades, they have to care enough to erect them. So far, for their dose of populism, Americans are content to let their patrician President eat pork rinds, lay out a horseshoe pitch at the White House and evoke a "kinder, gentler" nation like a smug, self-fulfilling national mantra...