Word: frightener
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...cannot and will not frighten us with 'punishments and threats.' Threats will fall on deaf ears...
Bulging inventories frighten economists because the stockpiles have the unavoidable effect of creating a vicious circle of economic decline. As unsold goods build up, businessmen are forced to pare back production and lay off workers, and this in turn drives up unemployment, which currently stands at 8.4% of the labor force. As jobless lines lengthen, consumer spending shrinks, and this in turn causes inventories of unsold goods to grow even more. Said Alan Greenspan of the Townsend-Greenspan economic consulting firm: "Involuntary inventory accumulation by business will be an absolutely critical piece of evidence in gauging the severity...
...Historian Kenneth Baker points out in the catalogue to this show, Morandi chose an art that could not frighten or persuade, as the mass-media imagery of Italy was intent on doing; his struggle was "to purge representation of its manipulative potential so that painting . . . might be carried on without cynicism or apology." Modestly, insistently, Morandi's images try to slow the eye, asking it to give up its inattention, its restless scanning, and to give full weight to something small...
Histrionics, tantrums and murky intelligence reports have become the watchword of Reagan's foreign policy, and they serve well to obscure topics like justice and poverty. The current uproar over Libyan "hit squads"--of whose existence not one shred of evidence has yet been offered--is tailored to frighten. Circle the wagons, or so the reasoning goes...
Most excesses do not display the exaggerator's art in it's best light: they are merely blurbs and rodomontade. In more complex usage, exaggeration does dynamic and suggestive work: it can be used to frighten or threaten , to reassure(oneself or others),to glorify and debunk, and, above all, to relieve the tedium of life to entertain. Exaggeration is one of the methods of all myth-from Olympian deities to giants like Paul Bunyan and John Henry, to mythic historical figures- Mao, say, or George Patton. A child exaggerates his parents' powers to the point...