(v. i.) To smile in an affected or conceited manner; to smile with affected complaisance; to simper.
(n.) A forced or affected smile; a simper.
(a.) Nice,; smart; spruce; affected; simpering.
Example Sentences:
(1) 5.14pm GMT Alan Pardew speaks ... With a smirk playing around his chops in a charm offensive on Sky Sports, he says he ‘massively regrets” sticking the hid on Hull City midfielder David Meyler and says he’ll be sitting down for matches in the future.
(2) If Kyrgios cares about his career – and sometimes he is so blase about his success, wealth and celebrity he professes to hate tennis – the hip young dude from Canberra who smirks when he should be smiling, who plainly is struggling with fame, needs to understand he is not the only clown in town.
(3) He often seems mysteriously amused, cocking an eyebrow and pulling a coy, wouldn’t-you-like-to-know smirk, but he likes to laugh out loud, too.
(4) Asked about his repeated gestures, grins and smirks towards the victims, she said it brought back memories of seeing him at Srebrenica.
(5) "Now we know our fortresses are secure," says their president, Tim Farron, a smirk of triumph in his voice, "we can collect 25 or 30 more Tory seats."
(6) They get angry at the justice minister’s smirk as he refutes “any security gap” when in fact the bombs exploded close to an interior ministry building and the headquarters of the Turkish national intelligence organisations.
(7) He has a way of holding a half-smile on his face while listening to his opponent that appears perilously close to a smirk.
(8) It can take all of a parent's ingenuity to get though a shopping trip without unwillingly picking up a tin of Barbie spaghetti shapes, a box of cereal with Lightning McQueen smirking from the front, or a bag of fruit chews with a catchy jingle.
(9) His bastard Ramsay has shown his colors (whatever color is for sadism), but Roose – who abstains from alcohol and only offers a smirk at Lady Stark here, a frown with Jaime Lannister there – is still a cypher.
(10) Bidisha : Two sexist remarks and one misogynist one At a major literary festival, before an event about military fiction, a posh famous English author smirked to me, "What's the difference between a woman and a piece of toast?
(11) I saw the smirk, too, when I went on the road with Prince and the Revolution two years later, accompanying the 1999 tour on several dates through the Midwest.
(12) They might have been even more shaken had they known that the men in casual clothes handing them these strange, badly set little pamphlets – with their funereal black borders and another death’s head leering at them inside next to the smirking wish “Good luck” – were members of New York’s police forces.
(13) With such knowledge comes a predictable illusion of power, though this is all too regularly punctured by the indignity of being kicked out of shiny receptions and told to use an entrance more befitting of our lowly status – or of having my pronunciation of “Southwark Street” incorrectly corrected by a receptionist, who gives her colleague a sidelong smirk, commiserating over my supposed ignorance.
(14) When I look at their faces, I see nothing but bravado, whether it’s Beyoncé’s stoicism, Kerry Washington’s smirk or Serena’s confidence.
(15) The camera cuts to Groves in the audience, who is smirking at Froch's words.
(16) Leonardo DiCaprio plays Calvin Candie, the sadistic plantation owner, smirking into the zoom lens.
(17) A political debate that revolves around sniggering at women’s body parts and smirks about gay hairdressers?
(18) On another occasion, as the judge addressed Mladic about the procedure, the defendant appeared to switch off and turned to the victims again, smirking and nodding at them.
(19) On Thursday, she was pictured semi-naked on the cover of the Daily Star, a cut out of the heads of presenters Ant and Dec over each of her breasts, above a smirking caption claiming that "Naughty Nadine Dorries has boobed again!"
(20) The Catholic father in Ken Loach's Jimmy's Hall is just the most implacable enemy of nice-as-pie communists showing everyone a good time; the village imam in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Winter Sleep is an ingratiating, smirking creep; and the local rev in The Homesman (as played by John Lithgow) is definitely a weasel, rather too obviously grateful not to have to transport three traumatised frontierwomen back east.
Spruce
Definition:
(v. i.) To dress one's self with affected neatness; as, to spruce up.
(a.) Any coniferous tree of the genus Picea, as the Norway spruce (P. excelsa), and the white and black spruces of America (P. alba and P. nigra), besides several others in the far Northwest. See Picea.
(a.) The wood or timber of the spruce tree.
(a.) Prussia leather; pruce.
(n.) Neat, without elegance or dignity; -- formerly applied to things with a serious meaning; now chiefly applied to persons.
(n.) Sprightly; dashing.
(v. t.) To dress with affected neatness; to trim; to make spruce.
Example Sentences:
(1) Permethrin (0.5%) was applied to individual Lutz spruce, Picea x lutzii Little, to protect them from attack by spruce beetles, Dendroctonus rufipennis (Kirby).
(2) The results show that 70% of the total activity of radiocesium and 60% of radioruthenium deposited in the spruce stand were retained initially in the canopy.
(3) There was no difference in LC50 between the two strains to larvae of spruce budworm (Choristoneura fumiferana), gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar), eastern hemlock looper (Lambdina fiscellaria fiscellaria), and whitemarked tussock moth (Orgyia leucostigma), whether expressed as total alkaline soluble protein, activated toxin protein, or International Units as determined by bioassay against Trichoplusia ni.
(4) A method is described for the isolation of DNA from spruce and fir, starting with 3 to 5 apices (5 mg material).
(5) Bratwurst grilled by use of pine-cones, spruce-cones and hard wood contained on average 28 ppb BaP.
(6) But spruce could also be a big loser from climate change because it cannot handle drought and its shallow roots are easily damaged in storms.
(7) With regard to an early diagnosis of defects within the photosynthetic system of conifers by air pollutants, we measured the chlorophyll fluorescence from microscopic parts of individual pine and spruce needles.
(8) Depth profiles of radiocesium were measured in a podsolic parabrown earth of a spruce stand and in a podsol of a pine stand up to 3 years after the Chernobyl accident.
(9) The time dependence of the specific activity of Chernobyl-derived 134Cs, 137Cs and 106Ru was determined in vegetation and soil samples from an old spruce stand within a period of 600 days after the beginning of the radioactive fallout.
(10) Mouse hepatoma cell line, Hepa-1, was exposed to acetone extracts of hardwoods (alder and aspen), softwoods (pine and a mixture of pine and spruce) and cellulose materials.
(11) Pure black spruce was found on Mount Washington from 1356 m to 1582 m. No pure black or red spruce was found on Camels Hump although the proportion of red spruce alleles was significantly greater on Camels Hump.
(12) A high relative intensity of the long-lived component was found in damaged spruces as well as in trees showing first symptoms of yellowing, needle loss or parasite infection, although all measurements were carried out with green needles which appeared visually intact.
(13) Yet it is understood that they are sprucing up their offer, slimming down their austerity demands, and relaxing debt repayments.
(14) Since 1952, the province of New Brunswick, Canada, has been heavily involved in attempting to control an epidemic of the eastern spruce budworm (Choristoneura fumiferana.
(15) Nor will £5m pledged to keep train stations spruce, or another £1m earmarked for Sheffield’s tram-train.
(16) mATPase activities were similar in both species, but spruce grouse contained 15 times more myoglobin in the pectoralis muscle and the heart was three times heavier than that of the ruffed grouse.
(17) Red and black spruce and their hybrids can be determined by morphological indices; however, the criteria are somewhat subjective and increasingly difficult to use at higher elevations.
(18) The dictatorships of Bahrain and Belarus, the Syrian dictator's wife, Pinochet himself – all have had their reputations spruced up by the firm.
(19) These results on the gymnosperm spruce leaves, in which greening proceeds in complete darkness, being independent of the development of the water-splitting system in light, were discussed in relation to previous observations on angiosperm leaves, in which both greening and the activity generation proceed in the light.
(20) Some rooms need sprucing up, but a smart new carpet on the staircase and genuine parquet floors in the kitchen must have impressed the half dozen potential buyers who have trooped round since it went to on the market in February.