So it was more than a little surprising when Faggen and I returned to the house one afternoon thinking that we were on time and were informed, in the sternest terms imaginable, that we were not.
Instead, the Hungarian government's intransigence prompted European officials to say in the sternest terms yet that they were prepared to take the government to court to reverse what critics fear is a drift back to autocracy in Hungary, a former Communist bloc country.
In sterner terms than those used by President Bush just three days ago, the State Department spokesman, Richard L. Boucher, said that "Israel needs to understand that targeted killings of Palestinians don't end the violence but are only inflaming an already volatile situation and making it much harder to restore calm".
Later Mr. Carter's "Dialogues for Piano and Large Ensemble," with the intrepid Tamara Stefanovich, reinvented the Romantic concerto in the composer's stern, somber terms.
He assumed the role of battlefield commander, admonishing the president in public in the sternest of terms.
The Times stylebook – the newspaper's arbiter of language – "is quite stern on the term undocumented," Ms. Preston said.
In Freudian terms, the stern Mimi, a practitioner of what we now call "tough love", is at work on John's superego, while the rebellious Julia, offering unconditional love, is exciting his id.
The binding has been quantified in terms of Stern-Volmer quenching plots.
Mel and Thomas aren't letting me play!" And the refrain, from another room, stern and in no uncertain terms from their mother: "Mel!
Additional accusations of payback and vengeance emerged, and Mr. Christie's approach to politics, which seemed in his first term like a stern but necessary corrective to dysfunction in Trenton, began to look increasingly like bullying.
