bluffness

He was brisk and active, with the careless bluffness of a sailor.

Bluffness and menacing gestures do not exhaust the possibilities of this key role.

For years I was put off by the aura of sanctity and bluffness which seemed to surround it.

The big man was a lot more devious than his size or his bluffness suggested.

Mr. Fitzgerald has the requisite blend of innocence and bluffness.

For all his bluffness, he was a good sort, and I never thought I'd find a consort."

Confuses bluffness and honesty with merely being rude.

Worst of all was their hearty bluffness: voice too loud, smile too broad, manner too open.

"It must be jolly," he said, recovering his bluffness, "to be rich enough to think ten thousand dollars isn't anything to write home about."

As for his bluffness and toughness and appeals to common sense, all that is, of course, simply the first trick of rhetoric.

His bluffness regained, he arose.

Even while he spoke, he recognised his tone as being too hearty, with the bluffness of a man putting inferiors at their ease.

"Come, come," said Kershaul with an unaccustomed bluffness.

The factors influencing the pressure drag are the general shape of the nose cone, its fineness ratio, and its bluffness ratio.

For all his bluffness, Suvorov later told an English traveller that when the massacre was over he went back to his tent and wept.

A certain bluffness of manner expressed the rapidity of his mind, without veiling his robust goodness of heart."

Basil Williams said Cobham "had all the coarse, roystering bluffness of the hardened old campaigners of that time".

The Hindemith Sonata begins with a kind of Bach toccata for the industrial age; elsewhere its Romantic heart hardens to a stoic bluffness.

The bluffness of Lewis, which before he became a don was only part of his nature ('Heavy Lewis'), was fast hardening into a persona.

There is plenty of lacrimae rerum here, and one may legitimately wish for a touch of Dryden's bluffness or of Pound's impatient suspicion of the elegiac note.

Ramage liked his straightforward bluffness and after a minute or two left him talking to Yorke as he went back up on deck to find Southwick deep in conversation with the commander.

He seemed to thrive on his refurbished role, blustering about repercussions if any of his men were touched by the courts, but in practice seldom going beyond the plain-man avuncularity and bluffness that so captivated his supporters.

As Haddock's role grew, Hergé expanded his character, basing him upon aspects of friends, with his characteristic temper somewhat inspired by Tintin colourist E.P. Jacobs and his bluffness drawn from Tintin artist Bob de Moor.