What's the difference between complacence and smugness?

Complacence


Definition:

  • (n.) Alt. of Complacency

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It arguably became too comfortable for Rodgers' team, with complacency and slack defending proving a dangerous brew.
  • (2) Such margins would be enough to put the first female president in the White House, but Democrats are guarding against complacency.
  • (3) He continued: "There's quite a lot of complacency going on and self-delusion going on.
  • (4) This posture of racially tinged complacency underlies most of the frequent backlashes endured by western feminists.
  • (5) Extensive research among the Afghan National Army – 68 focus groups – and US military personnel alike concluded: "One group sees the other as a bunch of violent, reckless, intrusive, arrogant, self-serving profane, infidel bullies hiding behind high technology; and the other group [the US soldiers] generally views the former as a bunch of cowardly, incompetent, obtuse, thieving, complacent, lazy, pot-smoking, treacherous, and murderous radicals.
  • (6) "One [of the dangers] is complacency, generated by a few quarters of good economic data.
  • (7) And if he wins substantially, it is quite possible that he will feel comfortable and complacent and focus again on his nationalist agenda rather than the economy.” At the standing bar, Tani, a striking figure in his dark-blue kimono and a trilby, puts down his drink, pauses, and recalls the time he spent working abroad.
  • (8) His approach, however, will be challenged by Labour, which this week accused the chancellor of "breathtaking complacency".
  • (9) But we shouldn’t be complacent – less than half of GCSE students are taking a foreign language, and more need to carry their languages forward into their careers and lives for the UK to really profit on the world stage - both culturally and economically.
  • (10) Perhaps it was a little bit of complacency, a sense that their mere presence on the pitch would be sufficient to beat Newcastle, but collectively they rarely matched Klopp’s dynamism in the technical area.
  • (11) The barrier to Rio is high and Pavey is not complacent: to ensure automatic qualification she will have to finish first in the trials and reach the 10,000m Olympic qualifying standard of 32min 15sec.
  • (12) But let's abandon any complacency that such injustice could not happen again.
  • (13) Applications and limitations of the findings to the problem of complacency in automated systems are discussed.
  • (14) The director of public prosecutions issued a timely warning against complacency this week.
  • (15) A recent survey of 1,002 people in Wales has supported these earlier findings, but found additionally that discriminatory and complacent attitudes on AIDS or towards people with the 'AIDS virus' are held by a significant proportion of the population.
  • (16) Mike Penning, the road safety minister, said: "I am not complacent about road safety even though Britain has some of the safest roads in the world.
  • (17) Meanwhile, an influential cross-party Westminster committee of MPs and peers has accused the UK government's national security council of complacency for failing to carry out any assessment about the impact Scotland's independence would have on the UK's defence and the future of Trident.
  • (18) He wrote on Twitter on Saturday that complacency had allowed racism to prevail and reiterated those comments in a column for the Sun on Sunday.
  • (19) "But even if domestic violence remains a priority for the Crown Prosecution Service, there remains the wider issue of complacency."
  • (20) That is in large part why Alistair Darling, the former Labour chancellor and chairman of the cross-party pro-UK campaign Better Together, warned in a Guardian interview last week that complacency was his campaign's greatest enemy.

Smugness


Definition:

  • (n.) The quality or state of being smug.

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.

Words possibly related to "smugness"