Looking back at my school reports, I start off as quite a swotty kid, and then when I get to 12 or 13, my teachers start saying: "Lee has started to joke around a lot in class." ❋ Laura Barnett (2010)
Newsweek looks like a college student desperately trying to fulfill the page requirement by using every trick in the word processing program to pad out a collection of underdeveloped ideas, banalities and clichés; by contrast, the Economist threads a line between sprezzatura (the prized nonchalance of an Oxbridge education) and the eager exam-taker who tries to keep writing after the bell has rung (the swotty reality). ❋ Unknown (2010)
I've taught at a pretty wide range of places: grad school uni where everyone shat ice cream, slacker slac, swotty slac, and my current institution, a diverse, proletarian place that I suspect is much like the big urban institution that employed you as a lecturer. ❋ Flavia (2010)
It takes a confident smarty-pants to wrap herself in such a swotty, sexless mantle. ❋ Jan (2008)
How else are we to save modern democratic and civilised views if not for the spectator's secret equiuvalent of WMD the aforementioned champion of freedom the rather swotty looking Mealie Phillips. ❋ Unknown (2007)
To my surprise—a surprise I cannot justify—he chose to sit himself, very deliberately it seemed to me, between a Muslim gentleman who was reading a newspaper, and two children who were surely his, busy playing with their Quetzalcóatl keyrings, Rosetta Stone mouse mats, and countless other items of swotty tat bought from the museum shop. ❋ Howard Jacobson (2006)
Yes okay, chastise me now, I know it's swotty and geeky and I'm very strange ... but I really do find it all fascinating. ❋ Kisobel (2003)
Starting over in a place where no-one had ever known me as a bespectacled, swotty, shy teenager. ❋ Unknown (2005)
I was always a swotty, straight-A student, fiercely competitive, constantly striving to be top of the class from pre-school to college. ❋ Unknown (2005)
Going to Uni was just like that for me as well -I was that specky, swotty teenager too. ❋ Unknown (2005)
Not too swotty, not too disruptive, though Izzie does ask a lot of questions in class sometimes. ❋ Cathy Hopkins (2002)
Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia had managed to find excuses for his bad marks as usual: Aunt Petunia always insisted that Dudley was a very gifted boy whose teachers didn't understand him, while Uncle Vernon maintained that "he didn't want some swotty little nancy boy for a son anyway." ❋ Rowling, J. K. (2000)
Euan Kerr who edited the Beano between 1984 and 2006 revealed in a book about his time in charge that he turned Walter into a "confident, likeable character" and toned down Dennis's bullying of his swotty, flower picking nemesis . ❋ Unknown (2011)
His films have always had swotty little pastiche moments among the death and dread; he was doing it years before Tarantino ever came to town. ❋ Andrew Pulver (2010)
This left them with way more free time than their swotty friends who'd studied medicine and dentistry grads, all of whom were fully employed according to their figures. ❋ Unknown (2010)
