(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.
Snobbish
Definition:
(a.) Of or pertaining to a snob; characteristic of, or befitting, a snob; vulgarly pretentious.
Example Sentences:
(1) As a true Blairite, Jowell rejected such “snobbish” attacks on the free market in rigged odds.
(2) The Olympics showed that there are sports stars out there who have personalities, which I expect some people were quite snobbish about.
(3) It is snobbish and condescending to mock any creative or practical manual work.
(4) He compared the manner of Nick Clegg , the former Lib Dem leader and deputy prime minister, with that of Cameron, saying Clegg had an “inbred arrogance (from no less a privileged background than Cameron, though seeming less snobbish because he went to Westminster instead of Eton).” Hillary Clinton intervened in row over Ken Loach’s film festival boycott call Read more One email, written while coalition talks were still going on , said the senior Labour politician Peter Mandelson was playing a “cynical double game” in an attempt to become foreign secretary.
(5) "Foodie" has now pretty much everywhere replaced "gourmet", perhaps because the latter more strongly evokes privilege and a snobbish claim to uncommon sensory discrimination – even though those qualities are rampant among the "foodies" themselves.
(6) I worked very hard over the years not to be in thrall to attitudes that were confining or snobbish.
(7) And like both of them, he is a very good if perhaps underrated writer (by which I mean that it’s easy for literary types to be snobbish about novels that read so smoothly), his imagination always turning outwards, where it fixes with apparent ease on some extraordinary new subject.
(8) And Graham Greene of course – I have enormous regard for everything he wrote, and just by talking about films he illuminated the medium and the art and he was marvellously un-snobbish about popular culture.
(9) He said: “His sneering and snobbish verbal assault says it all about the elite that run this country and their attitude towards the working classes that they expect to transport them.
(10) He said that James's criminals were far removed from "the reality on the streets of south London" and rounded on the Crime Writers Association as "snobbish and stuffy" thanks largely to her and those like her.
(11) I think we are very snobbish in London about condemning people for the colloquial language they use, particularly if it’s not meant with really unpleasant intent.
(12) The Front National has already begun attacking Fillon as a snobbish, political has-been.
(13) Read's austere outlook has been variously characterised – by friends as much as anyone – as "snobbish", "priggish" and "too obviously born to the purple".
(14) "Landlords can't afford to be snobbish about a tenant that is successful," Saunders said.
(15) The Daily Mail editor (and Associated Newspapers editor-in-chief) used a rare public speech at the beginning of the year to accuse the "snobbish" BBC of a "kind of cultural Marxism", stifling political debate and failing to represent the views of its conservative viewers.
(16) Photograph: Murdo MacLeod Paired with Felicity Kendal as his wife, Barbara, and pitted against their formidable, snobbish neighbour Margo Leadbetter (Penelope Keith) and her docile husband, Jerry (Paul Eddington), he gave one of the classic good-natured comedy sitcom performances of our time.
(17) And it was incredibly snobbish, and absolutely not the case that somehow the working classes are incapable of understanding satire.
(18) 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.
(19) As the Black Lives Matter movement continues to impact the 2016 presidential campaign , the Pulitzer prize-winning cultural critic’s often painful personal critique, Negroland – the title refers to the “snobbish”, middle-class, light-skinned African American world she grew up in during her childhood in Chicago – is a powerful historical lens through which to read the current state of “ respectability politics ”.
(20) He liked to study both sides of every conflict and “perhaps because I admired two parents who had diametrically opposed characteristics, the theme of my journalism was often one of reconciliation or of synthesis or simply of relatedness.” He saw the paper as “an extended conversation with the readers, always intellectually lively but never snobbish, exclusive or insiderish”.