In other words, the flipside of benediction is effrontery.
There is you, and there is him, and any attempt to imitate is effrontery, not a tribute.
It is her effrontery that puts them at ease.
It's difficult to mesh effrontery and excitement without being crude or silly, but at least one Moore Bond film got the balance just right.
Now, in his Newsweek piece, Clinton has the effrontery to once again revive his 1992 campaign mantra, "It's the economy, stupid," as the article's title without any sense of irony, let alone accountability.
So influential has Stevenson remained (Twain, Nabokov, Borges and Hemingway were all admirers) that it's almost unimaginable to contemplate the audacity — the effrontery, even — of someone attempting to extend Stevenson's invention and mimic his style, as if Long John Silver's parrot were perched on his shoulder, squawking phrases into his ear.
It's somehow very entertaining, and its bizarre, in-your-face anachronisms are carried off with such insouciance, such cheerful effrontery, that you can't help indulging them.
It's hard to decide whether New Yorkers should be insulted by the effrontery or amused at the absurdity.
The promise of immediate and radical change is a campaign fiction presented with such bald-faced effrontery that we hardly question it any more, unless it's coming from the other side.
It's one thing to steal an election, another to steal it with the effrontery and ruthlessness apparent here in recent days.
As always -- or at least over the past decade or so -- the most fascinating thing about Davos is not the empty effrontery of it all (that's old hat) but the fact that it's not what it used to be.
