(v. i.) To smile in a silly, affected, or conceited manner.
(v. i.) To glimmer; to twinkle.
(n.) A constrained, self-conscious smile; an affected, silly smile; a smirk.
Example Sentences:
(1) After months of simpering, “some old-fashioned ass-kicking” may be back on the cards.
(2) Her electric blue suit at the swearing-in ceremony was too bright for some and too tight for others – "but she's so beautiful," declared the critic in La Repubblica, simultaneously strict and simpering, "that she's instantly forgiven".
(3) He tossed Shakespeare into a modern-day, thinly veiled Miami in the electrifying Romeo + Juliet and sent Nicole Kidman wafting, purring and simpering through bohemian Paris in Moulin Rouge!
(4) She has a simpering second serve and is primarily known for her defensive impenetrability.
(5) The skeptics include Adrian Simper, the strategy director of the UK's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which will be among those organizations deciding whether to back the PRISM plan.
(6) While the TV audience has criticised Fernandez-Versini’s simpering, and complained that Cowell has lost his nasty edge, Brown has proved herself the most watchable judge.
(7) "From community projects to a share of the profits, renewable energy to Fairtrade products, the Co-operative believe that when the benefits are passed around it's good for everyone," went the simpering script.
(8) Ruskin, played by Joshua McGuire, is a simpering Blackadderish caricature of an art intellectual: a lisping, red-headed, salon fop.
(9) GEH says Simper is mistaken and that the technology is largely proven.
(10) I couldn’t possibly second-guess the NAO report,” he simpered.
(11) No one expects honourable conduct from an immoral institution, whose lecturers simpered like besotted lovers at Muammar Muhammad Gaddafi , while their masters pocketed Libyan money.
(12) Domhnall Gleeson Gleeson, who played a Weasley in Harry Potter and a simpering bandit in the Coen brothers' True Grit, may be more recognizable to audiences.
(13) "The Sweet Danish Life: Copenhagen: Cool, Creative, Carefree," simpered National Geographic; "The Nordic Countries: The Next Supermodel" , boomed the Economist; "Copenhagen really is wonderful for so many reasons," gushed the Guardian.
(14) In one of the wonderful Reith lectures Perry gave last year , he concluded that today’s art establishment is something of a dictatorship, simpering about the avant garde, snobbish towards the middle ground.
(15) Meryl Streep is nominated for her simpering turn in the dreadful Hope Springs and Nicole Kidman for her high-camp car-crash in The Paperboy (the centrepiece of which involves her urinating over an insensible Zac Efron ).
(16) In the wake of repeated criticism by conservative politicians and the publication of a paper documenting numerous allegations of “ABC bias” by the extreme libertarian think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, the veteran media reporter Errol Simper once wrote that the ABC was being subjected to “the most persistent orchestrated campaign of vilification” in its history.
(17) The simpering British politicians cower before him, but Gandolfini's General Miller is just about the only character who could feasibly face him down, and their brief encounter is one of the movie's highlights.
(18) Simper is also concerned that the plutonium metal, once prepared for the reactor, would be even more vulnerable to theft for making bombs than the powdered oxide.
(19) Says Paul Simper, a journalist who worked with her extensively in the 1980s: "None of the other British solo women from Sade's time, such as Alison Moyet or Carmel, made any impact in the US at all.
(20) She already looks to have what it takes to win, but as the series rolls on over the coming weeks, I hope that she won't fall prey to those who would all too readily accuse her of flirting, sulking, batting her eyelids or simpering her way to the top.
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.