Word: brazening
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...well on the way to becoming standard American style. Yet such an epidemic of flagrant braggadocio would have scandalized the country not long ago. Most Americans have always felt, as many still feel, dutybound to sniff at the ostentatious chest thumper and look down on all public boasting. Brazen self-admiration has never been considered criminal, nor necessarily degenerate, but it has always been judged tacky - poor form, at best. Good form has always required reticence about one's virtues. To think well of oneself was one thing, but, under the traditional rules, it was quite an other...
...could I be so brazen as to write in the book that my "host" was Christopher Bishop? But to put anyone else's name would habe been to lie. I couldn't do that. So I wrote nothing in the sign-out book. And someone had noticed...
...devil to spend on us," she adds. Despite the stiff competition a young man might find at a Thursday afternoon tea or an early evening jolly-up, it was still he who had to initiate any private dates. Sex was naturally a topic of great fascination, but few were brazen enough to discuss it in public, let alone defy their guardians to spend the night in a Harvard room. "We were all just goggle-eyed at the thought of doing 'it'," recalls Morss...
...weeks later, bandits again launched a brazen operation, this time during the nightly curfew. They smashed locks and shutters on a number of prosperous shops in the Pushtun Market, and made off with more than $1 million worth of cash and jewelry. Functionaries of the ruling People's Democratic Party were quick to blame the crime on insurgents, who were said to be trying to embarrass the government. The rebels denied responsibility, insisting that only the official cadres could have acted with such impunity during the curfew...
Ritt's strength has never been humor, but he does understand what Field's forte is, namely, a sort of plucky vulnerability. Even when she is talking tough and acting brazen, there is an openness in her smile, an irreducible innocence in her large round eyes, that disarms the crankiest spirit. She is ably supported by Tommy Lee Jones, doing another of his backwoods lunks. Familiarity has bred a certain agreeable expertise in him, a goofy nobility that wears well...