What's the difference between flatter and smug?

Flatter


Definition:

  • (n.) One who, or that which, makes flat or flattens.
  • (n.) A flat-faced fulling hammer.
  • (n.) A drawplate with a narrow, rectangular orifice, for drawing flat strips, as watch springs, etc.
  • (v. t.) To treat with praise or blandishments; to gratify or attempt to gratify the self-love or vanity of, esp. by artful and interested commendation or attentions; to blandish; to cajole; to wheedle.
  • (v. t.) To raise hopes in; to encourage or favorable, but sometimes unfounded or deceitful, representations.
  • (v. t.) To portray too favorably; to give a too favorable idea of; as, his portrait flatters him.
  • (v. i.) To use flattery or insincere praise.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) In platform shoes to emulate Johnson's height, and with the aid of prosthetic earlobes, Cranston becomes the 36th president: he bullies and cajoles, flatters and snarls and barks, tells dirty jokes or glows with idealism as required, and delivers the famous "Johnson treatment" to everyone from Martin Luther King to the racist Alabama governor George Wallace.
  • (2) With profound blockade, the slope of the edrophonium dose-response relationship was significantly flatter (P less than 0.05) than that of neostigmine.
  • (3) The groups showed significantly different iEMG fatigue slopes, with the control group showing declining iEMG by repetition, while the CLBP group showed flatter, slightly increasing iEMG.
  • (4) Facebook Twitter Pinterest Farage ’flattered’ by Trump’s call for him to be US ambassador In another shot at Obama, referring to remarks by the US president before the Brexit vote about the possible trade consequences of Britain leaving Europe, Farage said: “No longer do we have a president who says that we’re at the back of the line.” Everything you need to know about Trump and the Indiana Carrier factory Read more He also said Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent, had “wanted the European Union to be a prototype for a bigger model across the whole world”.
  • (5) "It may not be nice, kind or flattering, but to put it as unlawful would be startling," White said.
  • (6) Carbamazepine has a flatter concentration-time profile than valproic acid.
  • (7) Flattered, entreated, begged by the rest of the committee, he did not yield: "Recommendations are recommendations, there it is"; and "I honestly believe it's all there"; "I promise you I have done my very best"; "if I hadn't thought my recommendations were fit for purpose, I would not have made them"; "with all due respect, I could not have done any more than I did".
  • (8) Perhaps the most flattering epitaph for Ronnie Biggs, who has died aged 84, was written for him many years ago by the unlikely figure of the former commissioner of the Metropolitan police Sir Robert Mark .
  • (9) "So that was very flattering and a little surprising," she says.
  • (10) When spectrin was rebound to the erythrocyte membrane, a decay in the anisotropy was still present but was markedly less sensitive to solution viscosity and flatter at longer times.
  • (11) Things are different now: wonks observe that we’ve got lucky with the chairs – Margaret Hodge on the public accounts committee (PAC), Rory Stewart on defence, Sarah Wollaston on health – but committee work is flattered mainly by comparison with everything else.
  • (12) We praise and flatter each other and automatically learn the details of each other's lives.
  • (13) One-day chicks displayed reliably flatter generalization gradients than 3-4-day chicks.
  • (14) Early flattering comparisons were made with the Strokes and Sonic Youth.
  • (15) Their pay structure is flatter and their sense of responsibility to the community stronger.
  • (16) I will propose a new school funding model from the commonwealth which will be flatter, simpler, fairer to all the states and territories and equitable between students,” he said.
  • (17) The instantaneous I-V curve was linear while in the steady state the curve became flatter at low negative membrane potentials and steeper at high negative membrane potentials.
  • (18) To describe this course of action as "clutching at straws" is to flatter it.
  • (19) She should be confronting her party's prejudices, not flattering them.
  • (20) The steeper the curve of Spee, the more irregular the cusp height and angulations are with steeper anterior cusps and flatter posterior cusps.

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.