Word: smug
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...against him, and there has been a strong prosecution and a weak defense. When the stage is set around the jury-room table, an immediate vote shows eleven for Guilty and one for Not Guilty. The dissenter, Henry Fonda, begins a long haul against the prejudices, inhibitions and smug certainty of the other jurors to bring out the actualities of the murder night. In doing so, the inner actualities of his fellow citizens are laid bare...
...seems to be a race for expectability. Even love rears its precious little head to add a tired touch of creeping sentimentality. And, regrettably, the author has felt satisfied with stocking the stage with a cast of cliches: the idealist; a shabby-willed congressman who needs an issue; his smug colleague in the other Party; two excessively stupid sleuths from the FBI; a secretary who needs romance; and an asthmatic lump of sex from the botanist's home town. The only mildly refreshing character in the Capital seems to be a likeable old rogue with a supply of bourbon...
...Your smug claim to omniscience is so damn nauseating. Eisenhower-Nixon's re-election meant that "a new political generation had come of age with promising concepts of how Government ought to be run." I'm happy to be associated with those apostles of error in Government affairs: Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, George Kennan and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt...
...wary eye. The Russians were represented by 1984 men, whom history had given nothing but a theory of history. Jive and Marxism simply do not dig each other. It is Capote's achievement that the pseudo-sophistication of jive comes through as a kind of innocence, while the smug smog of Marxism is shown for what it is-a grey disease of the mind...
These notes of disenchantment are hopeful, for Uruguay's greatest enemy is smug optimism. But last week, with the south winds of winter dying away, optimism came easy. If spring marches in, can the Day of the Beaches be far behind...