smarty-pants
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Green’s characters are sweet, hyperverbal smarty-pants; they memorize poetry and say things like “I just want to do something that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter.”
From The New Yorker ● Nov. 30, 2018
But at the root of Jamison’s own grandiosity is not smarty-pants pretension; it’s a craving for emotional intensity that takes the form of an infatuation with pain.
From Slate ● Apr. 3, 2018
This smarty-pants spirit was on display in April at the Not the White House Correspondents' Dinner, where the honored guests included a table of fact-checkers.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 15, 2017
Einstein, always the smarty-pants, outdid them both: “No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.”
From The Guardian ● Mar. 4, 2017
Phony rules, which proliferate like urban legends and are just as hard to eradicate, are responsible for vast amounts of ham-fisted copyediting and smarty-pants one-upmanship.
From "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker
