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.

Male values don't include patience? 2009

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: 2009

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.

Andersen's English 2010

He combines California informality with north-of-England bluffness.

February 2006 2006

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 Richard Doddridge 2004

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 2004

“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 2004

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 2004

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

Cities In Flight Blish, James 1957

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 T.P. Wilson