Word: gruffness
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...begin living an uproarious travesty of a bad marriage, an astutely characterized study in incompatability. Matthau is a gruff, irresponsible slob, a sort of cigar-chomping depilated bear who shambles around in his ill-kept cave. A Friday night poker-playing crony judges Matthau by a Rorschach test of his refrigerator: "I saw milk standing in there that wasn't even in the bottle." By contrast, Carney is a fuss-budgety fanatic of cleaning and cooking. The kitchen is his womb, and the apron string is his umbilical cord. But his real specialty is crying on his own shoulder...
Although he knew of Sadler's growing restiveness and had several times .before talked him out of resigning, gruff C. R. Smith, 65, seemed caught by surprise. He did not even have time to pick a successor. For the time being, in effect, Smith reassumed the presidency himself, and American returned to being the one-man show that it had been for years...
Goldwater hopes to project himself as a man of strong convictions, gruff and honest, who is challenging many of the basic assumptions about recent American life and can supply the moral corrective, while he pictures Lyndon Johnson as too unconcerned with traditional values to be able to restore the country's real strength. Johnson hopes to project himself as the compassionate father of all, mindful of frailty, prudent in all things, as opposed to a heartless, reckless Goldwater...
...this dismayed friends and followers who had come to know him as a charming companion, a bluff, gruff-spoken man whose candor was a virtue rather than a vice, a candidate with deep convictions, if not the learnedness or the lingo of a political scientist, about a particular philosophy of government...
Faulkner also kept himself one of the least public of writers. He rarely gave interviews, and when he did he was frequently gruff and uncooperative. He secluded himself in a classical Southern house that was an almost defiant backward clutch toward a lost way of life. He often refused to answer the phone. When the movie made from Intruder in the Dust was given its world premiere in Oxford, he announced, to the producers' horror, that he would not attend. He finally did appear at the theater only because someone had reached an aunt of his in Memphis...