Word: smugness
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...loss of revenue was not quite so disturbing as the brazenness with which smug Harvard students tried to beat an admission fee. Also disturbing were the woefully stupid lies these presumably intelligent, aspiring picaresque heroes fabricated to get past me and my partner. Here are some examples. They disturbed me, but they might amuse...
...biggest feat is finding a few innocuous ways of bringing up the generally unpalatable subject of class in America. Growing economic polarization, she argues, has made the professional class, which is inherently insecure, more smug and selfish. Much of her evidence involves incidental, sometimes lighthearted perceptions about how this uneasiness reveals itself. To escape association with a shrinking middle class, yuppies have learned to choose the baby bass en croute over the chef's salad, Italian knit sweaters over flannel shirts, running over basketball and handcrafted cabinets over mass-produced maple...
Then Baldwin and the Whiffles -- an Ur-nerd quartet in plaid cummerbunds and smug smiles -- launch into a rendition of Sh-Boom at the charm-school talent show, and Cry-Baby takes off to parody paradise. It becomes a real musical (new songs, production numbers) and a careering melodrama: Grease with grit. Cliches collide, and so do jalopies; lightning strikes; the jailhouse rocks. Lovers lose themselves in a French-kissing dance that would have been banned on Bandstand...
...early paintings of that motif. The side of the Yosemite cliff in The Seventh Sister, 1981, recalls Clyfford Still and, through that, the American Romantic tradition of heroic landscape. Such works do not escape the second-handedness that comes with quoted images, but at least they are quite without smug prophylactic irony...
...power, Drexel had few friends among its colleagues. Even in an industry of flinty-eyed dealmakers, Drexel's way of doing business struck many people as arrogant and smug. "Dealing with them was repugnant," says an executive of Prudential-Bache Securities. "They had this self-ordained attitude of importance. They broke from all the established rules within the underwriting community...