Croker also softened in some cases the plainspokenness of the original.

I suspect that most voters long for the day when artifice and ploy give way to simple plainspokenness.

It has also cannily been structured as an ensemble work, a series of set pieces in which the characters react to Harold's plainspokenness.

There is a plainspokenness, a kind of folkish natural feeling, to Bley's lines and his harmony, I added.

Scout and Jem, with their intelligent plainspokenness, prove how unpopular you can be, sometimes, when you try to shape a strong moral conscience.

Along with the plainspokenness and sense of responsibility that characterizes the New Jersey art world is a wide streak of idiosyncracy.

In light of his newly claimed status as a veteran, he has gravitated toward an earnest, matter-of-fact plainspokenness in the new millennium.

In four years here, Ms. Albright often rankled - not just with her plainspokenness but also with what some diplomats considered arrogance.

Opposed to the exoticness of the organic component is the plainspokenness of what often look like parts of outmoded machinery.

In interviews and a seemingly nonstop schedule of debates and speeches, she talks about the group's work with an enthusiasm that blends plainspokenness and sophistication.

He vehemently opposed the introduction of Greek culture to the Roman republic, believing them subversive of traditional Roman military values and plainspokenness.

This kind of scene, not very pretty and certainly difficult, is perhaps as close as any of these landscape painters comes to meeting the Ash Can ideal of plainspokenness.

Mr. Schippers, a lifelong Democrat from Chicago, used the plainspokenness of a county courthouse prosecutor, with a generous dose of sarcasm, to persuade many moderates.

With a combination of erudition, plainspokenness, and panache, he made the often arcane workings of the stock market and the economy better known to the mass public for 32 years via Wall Street Week.

"In Jarrell's dramatic monologues and Schwartz's family epic, Bishop's tense plainspokenness and Berryman's jagged comedy, the values of Modernism are tested, resisted, and transcended," Mr. Kirsch writes.

"Like everyone else, we're faced with the fact that the cost of doing business is growing faster than sales," said John A. Goesling, the earnest and solemn chief financial officer whose plainspokenness epitomizes the culture of Nordstrom's upper echelons.