The phrase "a smartass" is correct and can be used in written English as well as spoken English.
It is considered a more informal and colloquial term, so it may not be appropriate for formal writing. Example: "He always has to make a sarcastic comment in class, he's such a smartass."
And he was a smartass, and that didn't help.
"I was a smartass film student who thought he knew everything about movies," Singleton said.
"Hey, I just got called a smartass by John McCain," bragged Jared Fernandez, high-fiving a friend.
I don't say that to be a smartass, but I know that that's the very essence of what makes my work good.
Make of that what you will though the real message I want you to take is that I'm a smartass seller of banal meta-fictions.
The n+1 writers, in too irritatingly a smartass way for some, combined – in editorial columns such as "The Intellectual Situation" – politics, theory, literature, criticism and sentences in one space.
Granted, a genius janitor who's great at math but sides as a career smartass is an irritation of the most privileged kind.
The sarcastic crowd now has a variety of winky faces to indicate a comment's smartass quotient and tone -- a critical innovation, if you ask me.
So, we give you Thinkware, a line of smartass t-shirts that encourage reading, literacy and not being a moron.
(I especially love Sue Heck, whose dorky innocence is a break from smartass teens elsewhere on TV).
Leng presents three possible interpretations for this couplet: "another play on the blind seer idea"; or Harrison's rejection of the concept espoused in his 1968 Beatles composition "The Inner Light", "that knowledge is the key to enlightenment"; or, like his 1975 rebuttal to detractors such as Rolling Stone, "This Guitar (Can't Keep from Crying)", a "dig at smartass rock journalists".
