What's the difference between cowardly and smug?

Cowardly


Definition:

  • (a.) Wanting courage; basely or weakly timid or fearful; pusillanimous; spiritless.
  • (a.) Proceeding from fear of danger or other consequences; befitting a coward; dastardly; base; as, cowardly malignity.
  • (adv.) In the manner of a coward.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) An unprincipled coward with the backbone of an amoeba."
  • (2) But cowardly useful idiots of Warwick have banned @MaryamNamazie.” On Sunday night the union released a statement reversing the decision, which it stated had gone against normal procedures.
  • (3) On Wednesday she declared that if Sir Gideon had sent Chloe Smith unprotected on to Newsnight, then he was "cowardly as well as arrogant".
  • (4) 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.
  • (5) But in recent years, directors have sought out the likes of Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood ( There Will Be Blood ), the Chemical Brothers ( Hanna ) and Nick Cave ( The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford ).
  • (6) Africans yelled at the police, "Cowards" and "Kill the white men."
  • (7) The only real black spot was that a cowardly Britain stood by in the 1930s and allowed Hitler and Mussolini to help General Franco win the Spanish civil war , pushing it into dictatorship and encouraging Nazi Germany to launch the second world war.
  • (8) It resulted in a royal command performance, a big hit and an Oscar win for Coward.
  • (9) It’s just one in a long line of cowardly and slimy moves by Ryan, who is really just Trump in a more aesthetically appealing wrapper.
  • (10) Though he strongly disapproved of much of what later took shape as "New Labour", which he saw, among other things, as historically cowardly, he was without question the single most influential intellectual forerunner of Labour's increasingly iconoclastic 1990s revisionism.
  • (11) I don’t know who you think you are, you cowardly, small-minded xenophobe who did this, but you do not speak for the community,” he added.
  • (12) An emotional Obama ran through a litany of Isis human-rights abuses, from rape to enslavement, calling them “cowardly acts of violence.” In a vague reference to Americans held captive by Isis or near its path in Iraq, Obama said the US would “do everything we can to protect our people,” a formulation that has preceded US military action in the past.
  • (13) Erase even more, you cowardly regime,” Abo Bakr wrote on a wall in a message to the whitewashers.
  • (14) With Veep , rather than striving young idealists, you have cowardly egomaniacs and bunglers who are involved in endless arse-covering exercises.
  • (15) Some of the strongest criticism came from Travis Tygaart, the head of Usada, who called the cyber attacks “cowardly and despicable” and reiterated that the athletes named had done nothing wrong.
  • (16) But it's fair to say a fondness for sniping games marks me out as a coward who'd rather take potshots from a distance than actually climb down from the tree and enter the fray like a man, a theory backed up by the fact that while I love sniping, I detest "stealth games" (because it's scary when you get caught) and "boss fights" where you have to battle some gargantuan show-off 10 times your height who keeps knocking you on your arse with his tail.
  • (17) With these unmanned craft, governments can fight a coward's war, a god's war, harming only the unnamed.
  • (18) Photograph: Reuters Elizabeth Bourgault, a runner who survived the blasts with injuries, also called Tsarnaev a coward.
  • (19) Conceived as a "response" to Ben Affleck's Oscar-nominated take on the 1979 hostage crisis, it promises a tale of cowardly US diplomats who are treated with kindness and eventually delivered to safety by their Iranian hosts.
  • (20) "I think there is only one explanation about this: that the family has been the victim of repressive measures, which are cruel and cowardly."

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.