Word: sangfroid
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...best, of course, if you were a player, a singer, a fellow musician. But with luck and fine timing, you could also be a casual guest, a dinner companion, a colleague's spouse--even, if the furies were snoozing, a journalist. In 1988 Sinatra, the paragon of show-biz sangfroid, told Larry King, "I swear on my mother's soul, the first four or five seconds, I tremble every time I take the step and I walk out of the wing onto the stage, because I wonder if it will be there when I go for the first sounds...From...
Despite the crisis with Jordan and Mossad's subsequent embarrassment, Netanyahu, says an official who dealt with him, was "the epitome of sangfroid" throughout the imbroglio. If the Prime Minister was unperturbed, it was because of his strong determination, which he has demonstrated from the beginning, to go his own way. That, however, is an increasingly lonely path...
...with this sangfroid that Peres shaped the government's response to one of the worst spasms of terror in the history of Israel or any other country. And more carnage may be ahead: Mohamed Abu Wardeh, the man who recruited three of the recent suicide bombers, has been imprisoned by the Palestinians. Security officials tell TIME he has admitted that five more bombers have been given their devices and are waiting to strike. Nevertheless, Peres has ordered no cataclysmic counterblow, no unleashing of Israel's superior might but rather a dogged effort to undo the terrorists through the conventional means...
...humans, that is called sangfroid. And if you don't have any sang, you can be very froid. But then again if Meade had known absolutely--by calculating the precise trajectories of all the bullets and all the bayonets and all the cannons in Pickett's division--the time of arrival of the enemy, he could indeed, without fear, have ordered his men to pick apples...
...book is a technothriller, we wouldn't expect lucid, evocative prose, although Davis does present us with the occasional gem: "He cut the corpse's intestines with the sangfroid of an obstetrician clipping a baby's navel cord..." But at other moments Davis lapses into tiresome literary tics, for example, the Amazing, All-In-One Speech Formula: within a few pages, we see people pleading, muttering, snapping, intervening, erupting, venturing, uttering in horror (a personal favorite), inserting furrowing brow in non-comprehension, half-gasping, rebutting, speaking sotto voce (a diving officer, no less), barking, snorting, and chirping...