What's the difference between pompous and smug?

Pompous


Definition:

  • (a.) Displaying pomp; stately; showy with grandeur; magnificent; as, a pompous procession.
  • (a.) Ostentatious; pretentious; boastful; vainlorious; as, pompous manners; a pompous style.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Leave aside the noxious and pompous view that the views of non-national-security-professionals - whatever that means - should be ignored when it comes to militarism, US foreign policy and war crimes.
  • (2) On last Friday's Radio 4 Today programme , the historian Robert Service played his part to perfection, pompously advising the BBC to "get some sense of proportion".
  • (3) He says that the idea of the corrupt, lying, pompous politician has become "the equivalent of the mother-in-law or Irish joke of the 1970s".
  • (4) As the debate reached its conclusion, Stockwood, dressed grandly in a purple cassock and pompously fondling his crucifix in a way that was devastatingly lampooned by Rowan Atkinson a week later on a Not the Nine O'Clock News sketch, delivered his parting shot of, "You'll get your 30 pieces of silver."
  • (5) She was terrifying but not pompous, and she could be quite playful, quite cosy in a strange way."
  • (6) Auda is more of a problem: his character is portrayed as an unreformed savage who cares only for violence, treasure and his own pompous self-image.
  • (7) Giles Oakley London • In conception and format, it was trite – while being undeservedly pompous and self-esteeming.
  • (8) About three years ago, he was teasing me about something – being thick probably, or making pompous speeches.
  • (9) His chairman, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, was more magnificently pompous, as befits an ex-foreign secretary.
  • (10) Please don't read my pompous views above as referring to the great majority of gallery shows, where dealers display art they hope someone will want to buy for their home, and new collectors are born every week.
  • (11) When those inside the temple are pompous hypocrites, maybe it is the better place to be.
  • (12) Those who actively seek out linguistic slip-ups will correct you with such glee that it makes you doubt whether their commitment to "calling out" bigotry matches their commitment to pompous arseholerly.
  • (13) Chaplin himself wrote about this process: "Sometimes a musician would get pompous with me, and I would cut him short: 'Whatever the melody is, the rest is just a vamp.'
  • (14) I realised that my goal here really is to represent – it sounds super-pompous – how we think and how we associate.
  • (15) "Without wishing to sound pompous, I do more research now than ever.
  • (16) I will leave the public to judge his actions.” Mick Cash, general secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union, said it should be no surprise that his black cab members across London were considering “a boycott of the Tory toff David Mellor over his outrageous, pompous and disgraceful tirade against one of their colleagues”.
  • (17) Rogue One: A Star Wars Story – five reasons we're still slightly worried Read more This caped crusader has had a personality upgrade Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Warner Bros The Batman we met in The Lego Movie aways seemed an unlikely candidate for his own solo film, a pompous jerk who was more Flash Thompson than Bruce Wayne.
  • (18) It was as absurd for a Tory MP to demand Abbott's resignation from the shadow cabinet on account of this remark as it was for Ed Miliband to tell her pompously "in no uncertain terms" that it had been "unacceptable".
  • (19) It's pompous twaddle with no relevance to fucking anything."
  • (20) This is all the more surprising since Tolstoy seems to speak freely, in his fiction, with the sort of moralistic-prophetic voice – the voice of a teacher of right and wrong – that lesser writers are obliged to use sparingly, unless they want to sound pompous and didactic.

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.