Mr. Mahoney, whose previous books include "Black and White" and "Edge of the City," gives us a cast of detectives with fewer of those hard-boiled, pungent, working-stiff qualities, cops with personality problems, than you find in the station houses of, say, Ed McBain or Joseph Wambaugh.
The organizations which have strong quality foundation and culture only will be able to survive in stiff global competition.
She'd aged a little, sure, but she had none of the stiff, unresponsive quality you might expect from someone who died in 1994.
The cultivated flowers that are often dried are those with a naturally dry, stiff surface quality—such as strawflowers (Helichrysum bracteatum), globe amaranth (Gomphrena), and statice.
Mr. Moonves wanted to emulate the Golden Globes telecast, during which the stars sit around dinner tables and seem to have a good time, rather than the Academy Awards show, which has a stiff, formal quality.
The characters sometimes have the stiff, generic qualities of allegorical figures, and the doomsday setting is only sketchily realized (a few medical school skeletons positioned here and there).
The Obama administration in effect agreed, asking a federal court to void the rule until it could be redrawn with stiffer water-quality protections.
Mattie's prose is stiff, formal (a quality lovingly captured by the Coen brothers), a little pious and platitudinous, given to scriptural quotation and fussy quotation marks: "I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful.
A good quality stiff tape can make a world of difference.
But maybe this stiff-upper-lip quality is exactly what makes War and Peace more enjoyable: it's familiar (as are all the actors), so we can relax and concentrate on what is actually a very complicated and ambitious piece of narrative.
