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Articles

What’s So Bad About Smugness?

Emrys Westacott asks whether it really is a terrible moral failing.

Elaine: “I hate smugness. Don’t you hate smugness?”

Cabdriver: “Smugness is not a good quality.”

So goes a popular snippet from Seinfeld. In a 2014 article in The Guardian titled ‘Smug: The most toxic insult of them all?’ Mark Hooper opined that “there can be few more damning labels in modern Britain than ‘smug’.

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