Word: smugness
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Durrell dutifully and deftly relates such episodes, customarily avoiding the smug coziness that tends to afflict family anecdotage as a genre. But the boy who grew into a topflight zoologist was always slightly more interested in the doings of four-legged animals than two. At picnics, he was absorbed, not annoyed, by flies and ants. His endless hours of watching in the fields and at the edge of the sea were rewarded by such wonders as the sight of two snails mating. Sidling up side-to-side, each fired out a small white dart on a slender rope that thunked...
Hanoi, convinced that Nixon's delay of troop withdrawals was essentially an empty gesture, reacted with smug cockiness. After the 32nd session of the Paris peace talks last week, North Viet Nam's Nguyen Thanh Le loftily declared that rising American opposition to the war at home, combined with what he described as a near mutiny among U.S. troops in Viet Nam (see following story), would compel Nixon to accept the N.L.F.'s ten-point peace program. A pivotal point calls for unilateral U.S. withdrawal...
...with the Christian Democrats, Kurt Kiesinger's party, and as a president critic of Kiesinger, who took the Chancellorship with a Nazi past, Grass is acting as citizen and not as writer. He has not, however, thrown over his writing desk. The same man who wrote about the "bourgeois smug" and the Onion Cellar in The Tin Drum and about Germany's "economic miracle" and the meal worms in Dog Years is at work in these speeches. Even in the midst of the political area, he can't refrain from telling an occasional story-though quite consciously...
...women were convicted and hanged as witches, and one man was pressed to death beneath large rocks for refusing to plead. The tradition holds that the executions were the result of a repressive fanaticism in the Puritan character. Underlying this modern attitude toward the Salem trials is a smug belief that since we do not now believe in the power of witchcraft, the existence of witchcraft is a delusion, as impossible and unscientific, say, as the Ptolemaic notion that the sun revolved around the earth...
...fill the current American prescription for a tragedy with a pain-killing happy ending, it should be made clear that Cheever means by his four "wonderfuls" very much the same bitter things conveyed in the famous five "nothings" of King Lear. There are no dizzy precipices edging the smug suburban surface of Bullet Park. There is, however, the "portable abyss" of the commuter's 7:46 a.m. to Grand Central...