smarmy

I've never seen an estate agent ever want to get rid of prospective buyers as fast as this smarmy man wanted to.

This participant felt "smarmy," as though she were "bragging." These were her feelings, but those feelings did not necessarily reflect reality.

And, most remarkable of all, this amazing energy is from within a smarmy denomination.

Original Pirate Material is chock full of bitter resentment, smarmy put-downs, and hell raising, another expression of that fathomless well of despair that has wrought such acts as the Sex Pistols, The Clash, the Specials, UB40, and Chumbawumba--all bristling with unchained fury at the nation's seemingly endless economic woes, which in their little corner of the isle become very, very personal.

Some "think there is something smarmy about politics," observes Leon Billings, president of Leon G.

In fact, they were quick to jump on every smarmy story leaked by the right about the Clinton administration's exit--yet virtually failed to report any of the Bush administration's apologies over and retractions of lies and errors--for example, the supposed looting of Air Force One by Clinton staffers which proved to be false.

(Imagine, for instance, what a dreadful piece of smarmy pastiche would have emerged in Britain, even if the idea had been countenanced in the first place.) In fact, the architects have been no more radical than their predecessors five hundred years ago.

Primarily a portrait of suburban teenage angst, Ginger Snaps feels entirely contemporary, yet it avoids the smarmy self-consciousness of most current horror films.

In a twofer of particularly smarmy proportions, Bush cronies made a mockery of campaign finance reform by shelling out $2.5 million in anti-McCain ads in New York, California, and Ohio.

Summer's here, it's time to send everyone a smarmy "Wish You Were Here" postcard--but first you have to hit a prime vacation spot.

If the author of this sometimes smarmy stage show expected his largely Catholic audience to be amused by this ceremonial throwback, he would have been surprised when, almost in unison, the people in the seats joined in to sing, "Bring flowers of the fairest, bring flowers of the rarest" with the actors on stage.

He is good on Holbein, on David's late portraits, and on Michelangelo, Mantegna, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Ad Reinhardt; a little boring about Rembrandt's and David's history paintings; and full-out smarmy about his pet passion, Gericault, who provides the locus for some terribly disingenuous-sounding teenage reminiscences, as well as for a fatuous, transparently competitive dig at Julian Barnes, who has also "claimed" The Raft of the Medusa, in his History of the World in 10% Chapters.

The smug, humorless political correctness of every smarmy line she uttered made me cringe on behalf of progressive women everywhere.

Forty-five years later when Hurok artists Margot Fonteyn and Rodolf Nureyev appeared on television's answer to vaudeville, "The Ed Sullivan Show," they stood an excellent change of being preceded by Topo Gigio, a smarmy mechanical Italian mouse puppet, and followed by any one of a dozen crass stand-up comedians just in from Vegas.

High abstraction swathed in passive forms, suffocating circumlocutions, this and more we suffer in this dreadful display of sexless, nerve-numbing, smarmy crap.