This mild-sounding opinion in fact represented an explosive change in policy.
A mild-sounding formula, perhaps, but one pitted with time-bombs.How loose, for instance, should the federal strands be?
With North Korea making overt nuclear threats, the job of deciphering Beijing's cryptic and mild-sounding statement may not seem a priority.
By dramatizing the word or sentence cut out with a glaring black line, a redaction fairly cries out, "Catch me if you can!" Postscript: The C.I.A., long vilified for its use of euphemisms (rendition, wetwork, sheep-dipping), has forthrightly changed its mild-sounding "Directorate of Operations" to the sinister-sounding "National Clandestine Service".
Publicly, the Europeans have been following the script – "a good night's kip and then go out there and give it to them," said the normally mild-mannered Ross Fisher, sounding more like Paulie Gualtieri from the Sopranos than Clark Kent – but behind the scenes they have been in awe of the way Montgomerie has comported himself this week.
Maybe Mr Yushchenko erred in naming Mrs Timoshenko, a volatile populist, as premier; smearing her after sacking her was foolhardy, though both are sounding milder now.A gently optimistic view is that the prospect of next year's parliamentary elections made a bust-up in Kiev inevitable.
Three weeks before the strike deadline, the mayor began sounding the alarm in his mild way.
But a far greater danger to liberty is the mild-mannered, soft-spoken Bernie, a pleasant sounding seemingly harmless old man, who is in fact a demagogue who has barely held down a job, ever, and feeds class hatred, jealousy, and envy.
A way-out sounding dish called murg shashi korma ($6.95) is in fact a mild Indian version of chicken a la king: boneless poultry in a velvety cream sauce.
Alert to the danger of sounding whiny, Atlas filters out all undigested lumps of irritation, achieving a mild-mannered befuddlement.
They were sounding boards.
