The word for the day, boys and girls, is smugmost. Credit where credit is due: Eileene coined it with a slip of the tongue as we passed through an upscale shopping district on the way home.
A few blocks from our house is a small knot of stores serving the Upper Montclair crowd. Some patrons are the well-to-do from the other side of the train tracks. Others are students willing to travel the mile or so from Montclair University in search of a Starbucks. Of course there's a Starbucks. There's a Starbucks on the moon, fer crissakes. The main drag handles a lot of traffic, and once the parking spaces start filling up, things get pretty tight. It doesn't help that drivers are more than willing to back up traffic while dropping off or picking up an errand-running passenger. ?It's just a few seconds!?
So it irks me when a pedestrian just strides out into traffic on that stretch, effectively demanding cars stop for him. Jaywalkers who hover on the curb, waiting for a window of opportunity, or who confines their habit to low-traffic periods, are fine by me. Jaywalkers who interfere with rush hour are not. It's doubly irritating when they pause in front of you, to wave ?Thanks for letting me through,? as if you had any choice. It's more a ?Hi! I'm being rude; don't run me over for it? wave.
?Run him over,? I told Eileene as we waited. ?Him and his cappuccino.?
She grinned. ?Nothing wrong with cappuccino.?
Not normally, but in the hands of a smug-looking yuppie, waving thanks at several dozen tons of glowering steel backed up on Valley road for his convenience, it is. Like his golf-casual outfit and wire-frame glasses, it's a small badge of privilege, a projection of a sense of entitlement to get in the way. We made fun of the area clientele a bit.
It was when I voiced pious thanks that at least I am not smug that Eileene cackled, ?You're the smugmost person I know. Uh?most smuggy? Smugglest?? (Slander, malicious and gratuitous slander! See if I let her share in the next pearl of wisdom to fall from my lips.) We laughed over our new vocabulary for a bit, too.
?Smuggest? may be proper grammar, but don't you agree ?smugmost? has a nicer ring to it? Let's see if we can't work it into general usage. I'd be proud to be the inspiration for a coined word, vicious lie though it may be.