"sabre" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to refer to a sword with a curved blade and a single cutting edge. For example: "The knight brandished his sabre and rode off into the sunset."
This week Mr Putin rattled his sabre at Kazakhstan, still ruled by the elderly Nursultan Nazarbayev: any succession squabble would be an opportunity.
That was fine when the Soviet Union was rattling its sabre and the Pentagon did not seem too bothered that weapons programmes usually overran their budgets.
DPJ politicians in the party's "realist" faction think that China must be made to understand that it cannot rattle its sabre with impunity.
A scar on his thigh came from a Cossack sabre that slashed him as he crossed the street, at the age of ten, to borrow yeast from a neighbour.
At low altitudes and speeds (up to about five times the speed of sound), SABRE would operate as a powerful, lightweight form of jet engine.
THE RECENT sabre rattling by Vladimir Putin may have unwittingly done what the United States Congress has failed to do for decades: refocus attention and billions of additional dollars on overhauling America's nuclear arsenal.
Nowadays, the stressors have changed beyond all recognition (there are no sabre-toothed tigers any more), but the responses haven't.
This month two long-range bombers flew down the Channel off the coast of Bournemouth in an indication of Moscow's sabre-rattling.
They interpret this as being because the wolves got kicked in the head by their prey at the end of a long chase when those prey had been cornered.Most sabre-tooth injuries, by contrast, are to the lower back.
On the other hand, the amount of twisting involved in doing this dragging would often have been injurious to a sabre-tooth's spine.It was hunting technique, too, that explains one of the tar pits' curiosities.
Mr Kerry also delivered a message in response to Mr Putin's nuclear sabre-rattling: do not go too far in testing NATO's military resolve, as it will backfire.
