bluffness

• “Potential employers and customers need to know that men are indeed capable of "emotional labor," but they may practice it differently, with more bluffness, more teasing, more ... noise.”

  Lance Mannion:

• “Dickens, dallying with more than one woman, was about to separate his wife from her children: David Rintoul gives him bluffness and a beard like an erection.”

  The Guardian: Andersen's English

• “He combines California informality with north-of-England bluffness.”

  February 2006

• “The convict population spoke of him as "that — — Frere," and registered vows of vengeance against him, which he laughed — in his bluffness — to scorn.”

  For the term of his natural life

• ““A little bluffness, Mr. Forsyte,” he said, “a little bluffness,” and after he had spoken he laughed firmly, closed his lips tight, and scratched his head just below where he had pushed his wig back, for all the world like the gentleman-farmer for whom he loved to be taken.”

  The Man of Property

• “In an old court of the old town lived a certain elderly personage, perhaps sixty, or thereabouts; he was rather tall, and something of a robust make, with a countenance in which bluffness was singularly blended with vivacity and grimace; and with a complexion which would have been ruddy, but for a yellow hue which rather predominated.”

  Lavengro

• “Having met a good deal of the sea, they knew, like a man who has felt a good deal of the world, that heavy endurance and patient bluffness are safer to get through the waves somehow than sensitive fibre and elegant frame.”

  Springhaven

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

  Cities In Flight

• “Either Mr Huntingdon would take things into his own hands, and, acting with characteristic impetuosity and bluffness, would most likely hinder where he meant to help forward, or else he would fail perhaps to understand and appreciate his son's views and methods of proceeding, and would prevent a successful issue by his impatience or interference.”

  Amos Huntingdon

• “For certain its owner had none, unless a lurking pride in his own bluffness and bluntness may be termed such.”

  The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction Volume 10, No. 288, Supplementary Number

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