Sentence examples for gruffness from inspiring English sources

Improbable as it might seem this summer, newcomers could eventually experience more of Britain's buried congeniality than its noisier gruffness.

You notice the number of times Don Draper, in Mad Men, orders an Old Fashioned (rye whiskey, sugar, Angostura bitters, orange peel, maraschino cherry on ice) and how well it suits his cut-the-crap, alpha-male gruffness.

The smooth V6-ness of the engine note gains the upper hand over any diesel gruffness once warmed up, and such is the torrent of pulling power that hills might as well not exist.

For many years, Pullman supplemented his writing income by teaching literature at a middle school and at Westminster College, both in Oxford, and he retains some of the traits common in favorite teachers: a sartorial trademark (red socks) and a goodnatured gruffness, calibrated to let the charming students know that they won't be indulged but not so harsh as to scare the timid ones.

Then, for a moment, he sets aside the recreational gruffness of the retired attorney: "My wife and I were always collectors in a kind of hit-or-miss way.

There was one dose of the old bracing gruffness.

A bottle of Scotch is produced, as befits the gruffness.

The younger man is put off, at first, by Barker's gruffness, not to mention the fact that Barker thinks nothing of shooting Dove in order to protect their cover on the job.

He is a substantial, mustached man, whose initial gruffness belies a sprightly intellect.

There we figured, are the elemental qualities of the American mind laid out in a row: the attentiveness to small detail, the blunt impatience with the sublitiesof personal relationship, the sentimentality masked by gruffness and wooden prose, and the veneration of Mother.

Explicitly, he rejected the limited point-of-view strategies of Henry James and the stylized austerity and gruffness of the hard-boiled writers.