What's the difference between bombastic and smug?

Bombastic


Definition:

  • (a.) Alt. of Bombastical

Example Sentences:

  • (1) With an out-of-session Congress deadlocked over immigration reform and right-wing lawmakers hell-bent on “sealing the border”, the White House faces intense pressure to do something – anything – about immigration, after years of burying a civil rights crisis in a mire of political tone-deafness and jingoistic bombast.
  • (2) Dotcom raged against LeaseWeb's decision in a series of tweets starting on Wednesday afternoon, suggesting in characteristically bombastic style that "this is the largest data massacre in the history of the internet".
  • (3) He is bombastic, the party establishment hates him, and he says awful things about Obama.
  • (4) In Back To School (1986), he is a bombastic, uneducated self-made millionaire businessman who enrols in college in order to encourage his son to complete his education.
  • (5) Experts may dismiss Pyongyang's recent threats to rain nuclear missiles on the US mainland as bombast by an attention-seeking dictator, but its promise to target Baengnyeong is being taken seriously.
  • (6) So the idea of a benevolent dictator is not my cup of tea Rand Paul Paul said polls became part of “a self-reinforcing news cycle because of the celebrity nature that goes on, on and on”, though he accepted that voters might “at a superficial level be attracted to bombast, insults, junior high sort of lobbing of verbal bombs that kind of stuff”.
  • (7) Yet Duterte’s tough on crime bombast goes down well with Filipinos.
  • (8) Veteran fundraisers criticize the media coverage generated by Trump’s television personality and bombastic one liners.
  • (9) Throughout the case Brandis had been venturing his trademark bombast, but the settlement was too much.
  • (10) At the Japanese company's typically bombastic E3 press conference – the last act of the traditional day of press conferences prior to the show's proper opening – we learned that the PlayStation 4 will go on sale before the end of the year at a cost of £349 (significantly less than the Xbox One's £429 RRP), and that it will completely eschew any of the Draconian digital rights management (DRM) measures which Microsoft has mooted for the Xbox One, leaving PS4 owners just as free to sell or redistribute second-hand games as PS3 owners are now.
  • (11) On the Republican side, that mostly meant the rise of Trump – the bombastic real estate mogul who remains the frontrunner with only 27 days to go before the Iowa caucuses.
  • (12) Matteo Salvini, the bombastic rightwing leader of Italy’s xenophobic Northern League, has even accused Pope Francis of doing a disservice to Catholics by promoting dialogue with Muslims.
  • (13) What is playing on these stations is not a loop of upbeat midi video-game songs or some bombastic score written for the game, but Michael Jackson, Hall and Oates, Cutting Crew and Luther Vandross.
  • (14) The fact is that Renzi’s defeat was almost a foregone conclusion give the scale of the opposition he faced, and not just from Salvini and Beppe Grillo, the bombastic former comedian and head of the Five Star Movement .
  • (15) The bombastic, swaggering, sometimes vulgar billionaire has stunned the political world, plunged the Republican party into civil war and, among the pundit class, relegated the prospect of the 240-year-old republic’s first female president to a footnote.
  • (16) Words matter and remembering that we were all once strangers in a strange land and that the US is made better in every generation by the arrival of New Americans is central to my campaign.” The Republican party is making a safe space for really racist​​ undertones against undocumented immigrants Professor Jose Luis Benavides Vargas wants candidates to understand that their words matter – even more so in a campaign cycle so far dominated by the bombast of a billionaire businessman who began his campaign by describing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” who are “bringing crime”.
  • (17) To the United States government, defenders of the war in Vietnam and conservatives everywhere, Ali was the most dangerous of enemies, a converted zealot, the bombastic mouthpiece of a religion few until then had heard of and hardly any of whom understood, the Nation of Islam.
  • (18) Behind all the bombast Kinnear possesses a certain warmth and shrewdness that appeals to some players.
  • (19) The impeccably-coifed rockers from Sheffield opened the ceremony in bombastic style, launching into their hit single R U Mine?
  • (20) Then a campaign group created a pro-voting registration website called Grime 4 Corbyn – featuring the track Corbyn Riddim, which sets one of his speeches to a bombastic instrumental.

Smug


Definition:

  • (a.) Studiously neat or nice, especially in dress; spruce; affectedly precise; smooth and prim.
  • (v. t.) To make smug, or spruce.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) "Anne Hathaway at least tried to sing and dance and preen along to the goings on, but Franco seemed distant, uninterested and content to keep his Cheshire-cat-meets-smug smile on display throughout."
  • (2) What's more, his genial stiffness and shy self-awareness give him a kind of awkward dignity compared to the preening smugness of Cruz.
  • (3) It might be worth looking at how others do it, and not smugly concluding that the public likes the NHS the way it is.
  • (4) He is far too astute an analyst of comedy to be unaware of the danger of looking smug and there were sufficient layers of irony and knowing jokes within jokes for the conceit to work.
  • (5) I smiled smugly – there’s nothing like praise from a kindred spirit.
  • (6) And he provided the catalyst that improved the lot of the player in what had become an exceedingly smug game.
  • (7) Our political class is indeed the pinnacle of smug regurgitation.
  • (8) Meanwhile, eco-triumphalists will witter smugly about how the ban will save - what was it again?
  • (9) He had to do more than opt out of the yah-boo , smug sixth-form wordplay of the House of Commons.
  • (10) Dave meanwhile lapsed into his shrill Bullingdon Club persona; the dividing line between self confidence and smugness is gossamer thin for the prime minister.
  • (11) Before a ferociously red crowd, in which the Australian fans, scattered throughout the stadium in little blobs of yellow, struggled to assert themselves in any meaningful way, the Chileans started with their customary disregard for defence, a line of five attackers purring forward with gushing, almost smug intent.
  • (12) Softness and tenderness, wistful ironies” he conceded as blindspots, describing Motown as mere “foot fodder” but having a lot of time for relatively minor practitioners such as Joe Tex , who he saw as “hugely smug” but with “great charm and inventiveness”.
  • (13) The most likely comment to exasperate Serwotka is the assertion that they're fat cats, a smug drain on the public purse: of 301,000 members "we've got 30,000 people earning just above the minimum wage, 100,000 earning less than £15,000 [the average civil service salary is £22,000].
  • (14) Maurice Vassie Deighton, North Yorkshire • If recent history is anything to go by, then Jeremy Corbyn has every chance of being elected prime minister ( Why smart Tories should not be smug about Corbyn , 27 July).
  • (15) Among other things, the novels work as a meditation on America's Calvinist conscience, its strengths and blindnesses, and the way that it moved from fanaticism to smugness in the century after the civil war.
  • (16) It satirises the smug, modernist home-owners often seen in the pages of US interiors magazine Dwell.
  • (17) This kind of smugness is always given short shrift by the elderly.
  • (18) Feminism , according to Moran, is "simply the belief that women should be as free as men – however nuts, dim, deluded, badly dressed, fat, receding, lazy and smug they might be.
  • (19) With incredible complacency, politicians from both sides of parliament basked in the glory and reacted smugly when the US and the eurozone hit a brick wall.
  • (20) They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody's son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism.