What's the difference between complacent and haughty?

Complacent


Definition:

  • (a.) Self-satisfied; contented; kindly; as, a complacent temper; a complacent smile.

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.

Haughty


Definition:

  • (superl.) High; lofty; bold.
  • (superl.) Disdainfully or contemptuously proud; arrogant; overbearing.
  • (superl.) Indicating haughtiness; as, a haughty carriage.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) But he was apt to say to those with a haughty attitude things like: "Do you know who I am?
  • (2) The mountain is haughty and proud, an enormous glacier fills the valley in front and in the foreground – giving scale to the scene and a sense of infeasibility to the task facing the men inside them – is a little collection of tents.
  • (3) In "Marching (As Seen from the Left File)", for instance, he describes the men from the perspective of one of them and in "Break of Day in the Trenches" he identifies with the lowly rat against the "haughty athletes".
  • (4) One member, in a very haughty voice, said, rather like Lady Bracknell's "A handbag?"
  • (5) Janice Turner, The Times 'Haughty' … Gwyneth Paltrow.
  • (6) The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, said Mandela "was never haughty.
  • (7) Her supposed haughtiness, she claims, stems simply from a lack of confidence.
  • (8) Nobody in Whitehall wants to risk a repeat of the calamity of 1973 – when President Richard Nixon ordered an end to intelligence sharing with Britain, having taken a dim view of Edward Heath's cosiness to Europe, and his haughty attitude to the US.
  • (9) The SNP leader would like to stage the referendum in 2014, the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, one of those rare Scottish victories over England on the battlefield when Robert the Bruce and his stubborn warriors defeated a large and haughty force of English knights.
  • (10) The surprise in the film was not just that the French had made a decent rom-com – "We were all saying, suddenly, when it was made, that it was sort of the best of the French and the British types of these films, which is rare, and why it works" – but that Paradis, with no comedy films behind her, had made such a fine rom-com lead: mesmerisingly watchable in the first half in particular, when she plays haughty and hard-to-get; before, of course, the melt.
  • (11) Strong-arming a second administration out of consulting a suffering populace could look dangerously like haughty contempt.
  • (12) Many in Ireland, used to the populist bonhomie of working-class male politicians such as Bertie Ahern, have always found her cool, even haughty.
  • (13) Not many clubs can say that,” Wenger said, during a slightly haughty press conference.
  • (14) Jadranka adds: "This was my offence," and she pulls out an identity card from the period: a haughty face, high cheekbones, jet black hair and very beautiful.
  • (15) Tall and with a haughty baritone not unlike that of his conservative arch-enemy William F Buckley Jr, Vidal appeared cold and cynical on the surface.
  • (16) And when the British belatedly repented their haughty disdain for the European project, and applied to join, it was under Harold Macmillan’s Tory government.
  • (17) As if to atone for that disaster, its latest ill-advised form of words, chosen to pacify the restive masses, is " It is not prejudiced to worry about immigration " – but that won't dispel the lingering whiff of haughty moral judgment (shades here of a danger that awaits all out-of-touch politicians: the rhetorical equivalent of Ceausescu's right hand, attempting to still the crowd as the gesture made them even more irate).
  • (18) His comments have a grain of truth in them, certainly, but they played to the Times's weak spot – the impression that it can radiate a patrician aloofness, of haughty disregard of the lessons it could learn from competitors.
  • (19) Dimitar Berbatov slotted it away with haughty indifference to mere goalkeepers at spot-kicks.
  • (20) And the moment they find one, they launch into a performance of such deranged, self-assured haughtiness, the Daily Mail seems hopelessly amateur by comparison.