(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.
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.