Asked if it was a playful moment of invention, Rubin responds sternly, almost Cosellianly, "It wasn't playful.
Mr. Bush leaned over his lectern, sternly, almost angrily rejecting Mr. Kerry's charges and repeatedly throwing back at a past argument that Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time.
He governs sternly and secretly, almost never grants interviews, and has overseen an unrelenting crackdown on journalists, lawyers,and religious leaders who defy one-party rule.
I have learned time and time again that a sternly stated "never" is almost a guarantee that it will be so.
"I don't think about it," he said sternly.
Or so it seemed on CBS's "Face the Nation" when Mr. Cain, the former pizza company executive known for his perpetually cheerful disposition, found himself being sternly dressed down by Mr. Schieffer almost like a misbehaving schoolboy – not the treatment presidential candidates normally expect from a Sunday television interviewer.
Many of the movements are inchoate, dissolving almost as soon as grasped; there are repetitive tics, sternly and frowningly addressed, and sudden whims, expressed in breezily formless rushes of activity.
In the city center, the policemen gave way to policewomen in snappy turquoise Bermuda shorts who looked sternly ahead as they searched for traffic on streets almost devoid of cars.
More than 15,000 people demonstrated in central Seoul on Saturday evening, despite a warning from President Lee Myung-bak that he would begin to deal sternly with protesters who have been disrupting his government for almost two months.
She was also a fan of John Donne, an even more sternly handicapped genius, and one evening got us into an extended conversation — I remember almost every word of it — about his poem "Aire and Angells" (note the spelling), which she was unravelling with an eleventh grader.
