Word: matter-of-fact
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...give as for the stories he can write. He avoids press conferences (except King's) because he usually knows what is going to be said and is already busy writing it up. He writes in pencil in a barely legible scrawl, and in an unvaryingly matter-of-fact, elliptical style. Of his adeptness in drawing out important people, a Cabinet minister once observed: "You know, Charlie just talks about the weather and unimportant things, then slips his real question in, and he's got the story before you realize...
...American romantics like Walt Whit man have cried that democratic Americans "rise at once against the never-ending audacity of elected persons." But the U.S., says Brogan, "was made by politicians" - types who readily indulged in romantic rhetoric but were basically "matter-of-fact men . . . with a clear head for bookkeeping." "To have created a free government . . . without making a sacrifice of adequate efficiency or of liberty is the American achievement...
Noss would also discard the Western collection plate, substitute a wooden box at the door. Says he: "The Japanese do not have our matter-of-fact attitude to ward money. For example, to give a tip to a hotel maid by handing her the cold and bare coins is to show one's lack of breeding; one will wrap the money in clean white paper, and if possible put this little parcel on a tray. Perhaps the Christian people are used to it now, but lifting the offering to the sound of clinking and jingling coins is often quite...
...wild, reckless, intoxicated efforts her friendship put them to. Dr. Aziz happily spent all his money, the resources of a lifetime, and risked his neck repeatedly, merely to take his English friends on a picnic. One of the most vividly imagined people in English fiction, normal and matter-of-fact as anybody's grandmother, Mrs. Moore set a large and strategic portion of the Empire on edge merely by being herself in an unbelievably different world...
...when she told him that she wanted a child he flushed darkly, swallowed hard, laughed, and began a matter-of-fact, apparently inconsequential story about all the tangled family feuds, murders, suicides, money troubles, duels, wickedness, misery. When Victoria asked him about all the Negroes with family resemblances to the Grandolets, he silenced her with a look so black and a voice so low and level that she was drenched with fear. When they decided to have a child, Victoria was conscious of an odd chilliness crawling slowly over her skin, suddenly realized: "She had never liked to be touched...