bumptiously

He craned his neck, looked here and there for the officialdom that would be bumptiously present on Earth.

She was not bumptiously friendly.

Timothy DeKay is bumptiously athletic as the nonsinging Casey.

If Mozart's signature instrument is the clarinet, ambiguously bittersweet, Sibelius's is the bassoon: dark, rasping, bumptiously sorrowful.

It could disturb even the settled logic of a more developed species-and it trusted bumptiously that it would disturb even Vulcans, perhaps even Designers.

In David Bruce Goldberg's "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun," a bumptiously atonal Whitman setting receiving its world premiere, Mr. Williams revealed a contrasting dramatic intensity, climbing confidently into his tenorial upper range.

The style is bumptiously Fieldingesque, but subversively pumped up with allusions not only to yesterday and today but to Pynchon's other novels and many 20th-century masters of fiction; the allusiveness and self-awareness are a good part of the fun.

Monitors in the cartoon and comics exhibition tick off a brief history of cartoons since World War II, and the visitor presses buttons to call up political caricatures of the period, including Ronald Reagan bumptiously manipulating a Japanese-prime-minister puppet.

The style is playful, a pastiche redolent of the musty journal and the capitalomania of the day, bumptiously Fieldingesque, and yet as pumped-up and heightened and chock-full of late-20th-century references as the dernier cri from the street.

If Twain's greatest work has been banned by school boards and bumptiously denigrated as coarse hackwork (by Jane Smiley, in Harper's Magazine), Ernest Hemingway pugnaciously declared that all modern American fiction descends from "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."