Bluffing

“ He is obliged to prop himself. He is bluffing. You can make him quit. The folded arms and expanded chest of the bluffer mean no more than the high-arched back of a cat. Stroke "Tom" soothingly, and he stops bristling. Stroke the human bluffer tactfully with persuasion, and he will not act pugnacious for long. ”

“ There is a game called poker, at which a man without much control over his features may exceed the limits of the handsomest allowance. His lordship's face during a game of poker was like the surface of some quiet pond, ruffled by every breeze. The blank despair of his expression when he held bad cards made bluffing expensive. The honest joy that bubbled over in his eyes when his hand was good acted as an efficient danger-signal to his grateful opponents. Two weeks of poker had led to his writing to his uncle a distressed, but confident, request for more funds ”

“ Since I have lived in America I have become familiar with a word which is very similar—a bluffer. But a bluffer is a conscious liar and may be a humorist, whereas a spuffler does all in his power to deceive himself and is always in dead earnest. ”

“ That was why they lied and were unable to work greatly with their hands. Finally, there was a new human force called "bluff." A man who made a bluff must be dead sure of it, or else be prepared to back it up. Bluff was a very good thing--when exercised with discretion. ”

“ There was an entrance between the growth and bluff, where any one would least suspect it, because, at the mouth are two bold rocks, which are apparently attached to the bluff itself; this delusion is accomplished by keeping the interstices filled with fresh brush so laid as to appear like a natural coppice. ”

“ Those that design to do ill support themselves by falsehood and lying: A wicked doer gives ear, with a great deal of pleasure, to false lips, that will justify him in the ill he does, to those that aim to make public disturbances, catch greedily at libels, and false stories, that defame the government and the administration. 2. Those that take the liberty to tell lies take a pleasure in hearing them told: A liar gives heed to a malicious backbiting tongue, that he may have something to graft his lies upon, and with which to give them some colour of truth and so to support them. ”

“ To bluff, unchanged in form, takes on the new meaning of to lie: a bluffer is a liar. Scores of American phrases are in constant use, among them, all right, never mind, I bet you, no sir and I'll fix you. It is curious to note that sure Mike, borrowed by the American vulgate from Irish English, has gone over into American Yiddish. ”

“ Only cowards lie. One who is capable of lying is capable of murdering, of stealing, of betraying his king and his country....”
So he ran on and ran on. I had heard such utterances from him in my earliest childhood, when he was my governess, afterwards when he was my class teacher, and again when he wrote in the newspaper.
I interrupted.
“You find fault with your son for lying, and yet you yourself have, in his presence, told a whopping lie. You said this seat was occupied by a gentleman. Where is that gentleman? Show him to me.”
The pedagogue went purple, and his eyes dilated. ”

“ Every one took up the letter, every one examined it, read the obnoxious sentence over and over again, and when they were all perfectly convinced, that this abominable libel upon their much adored master existed, there arose a tumultuous uproar, during which, every person endeavoured to vent his anger, by uttering the most contradictory imprecations, mingled with the most pathetic exclamations. ”

“ II. The grossest kind of lying, or speaking a known falsehood under the awful solemnity of an oath.—Men violate truth when they affix to words an arbitrary meaning or make in their own minds certain secret reservations with a design to disguise facts and deceive the hearers. When we express doubtful matters in terms and with an air of assurance, we may materially injure as well as grossly deceive our neighbour. ”

“ Given over from that hour to the very incarnation of plotting crime, none to resist the evil impulse of my own maddening heart, the partner, forced on me by fate, leading me deeper and deeper into the inextricable hell,—from that hour fraud upon fraud, guilt upon guilt, infamy heaped on infamy, till I stand a marvel to myself that the thunderbolt falls not, that Nature thrusts not from her breast a living outrage on all her laws! ”

“ Under a lie (that is, a mutual secrecy) , I sell it to the landlord of the Bell at Maidstone, say.... My landlord sells it to a customer under a lie. We are all engaged in crime, conspiracy, and falsehood; nay, if the revenue looks too closely after us, we out with our pistols, and to crime and conspiracy add murder. Do you suppose men engaged in lying every day will scruple about a false oath in a witness-box? Crime engenders crime, sir.”—Denis Duval, chap. vii.
[34] From Sir Walter Scott we might gather numerous examples and aphorisms to the purpose. ”

“ BLUFF. Synonyms:
Bluff is a word of good meaning, as are frank and open. The bluff man talks and laughs loudly and freely, says and does whatever he pleases with fearless good nature, and with no thought of annoying or giving pain to others. The blunt man says things which he is perfectly aware are disagreeable, either from a defiant indifference to others' feelings, or from the pleasure of tormenting. ”

“ Why, if there be not proof as strong as truth itself why do they dare to bring an accusation against one of your high house? Oh, young man! young man! if you have slain him by fraud or villany, I will take vengeance of you by making you the public spectacle, and giving you up to the rope and scaffold: chains shall hang about you even in your death, and your bones shall whiten in the wind. ”

“ It is false accusation indulged in apart from any obvious purpose. Like the swindling of pathological liars, it appears objectively more pernicious than the lying, but it is an expression of the same tendency. The most striking form of this type of conduct is, of course, self-accusation. Mendacious self- impeachment seems especially convincing of abnormality. ”

“ With regard to guilt or innocence, blushing offers no evidence whatever. There is a great troop of people who blush without any{51} reason for feeling guilty. The most instructive thing in this matter is self-observation, and whoever recalls the cause of his own blushing will value the phenomenon lightly enough. ”

“ In many of the public papers, you have been called, in the most direct and offensive terms, a liar, and a coward. When did you reply to these foul accusations? You have been quite silent, quite chop-fallen: therefore, because you was silent, the nation has a right to pronounce you to be both a liar and a coward, from your own argument: but, Sir, I will give you fair play; will afford you an opportunity to wipe off the first appellation; by desiring the proofs of your charge against me. Produce them! To wipe off the last, produce yourself. ”

“ Do you not offer them a mortal insult by presenting to them such nonsense as argument? And if your constituents were capable of suffering themselves to be deceived by such unspeakable absurdities, or to accept the insult without resentment, would such an attempt at deception under any circumstances be the part of an honest man? Is there really no blush rising to your cheeks when you look at your performance?
These are the three falsehoods which, when writing my last letter, I selected for exposure from a larger number. ”

“ A curious phase of human nature is it,—well worthy of the attention of physiologists, but none the less known to those in the habit of attending criminal courts,—that you may with tolerable certainty detect a man deliberately swearing falsely when giving evidence on oath. Villain as he may be,—scoundrel of the deepest dye,—even he does not altogether enjoy the sensation of, in cold blood, committing perjury before a crowd of comrades, every one of whom knows that he is forswearing himself. ”

“ But I paid the less attention to this, for I knew it was usually said by those who have the underhand. "There's more than that," he continued, "and all in the same story: lying words, lying papers, tricks fit for a peddler, and the show of what's legal over all, to make a man the more angry." ”

“ But, my dear friend, if such be the penalty annexed to the concealment of error and duplicity by an ingenuous mind, even when that concealment is qualified by the powerful motives of preserving the peace and interest of all around us, what, I ask, must be the horrors of the mind, which covers, with a veil of darkness, the fraud intended to ruin the innocent, to betray the unsuspecting, and to defraud the ignorant? What must be the state and condition of those whose life is a lie? ”

“ Every den of drunkenness, debauchery, profanity, lying and gambling, lies spread open to the All-seeing eye. Not an oath falls without his notice, not a fraud, a deception, cheat, lie, or crime of any sort escapes Omniscience. All, all sins, transgressions and misdemeanors of every sort are treasured up and kept in store for the day of final account. ”

“ The gradual debasement of a word into a term of reproach is sometimes a species of scandal. It is wilfully perverted in the course of years, and made to tell a different tale,—a false tale, probably,—which generations receive as true. ”

“ What, if she could think how fearful is my interest in these outrages, that in all probability, if their authors are detected, there is one who will drag me into their ruin; that I am given over, bound and blinded, into the hands of another; and that other, a man steeled to mercy, and withheld from my destruction by a thread—a thread that a blow on himself would snap. ”

“ Would you believe him, if he said it on his oath?
16 46But what is the difference between a perjurer and a liar? He who is in the habit of lying, is in the habit of perjuring himself. The man whom I can induce to tell a lie, I shall easily be able to prevail on to take a false oath. ”

“ To bluff an honest man was to be dishonest. To bluff a bluffer was to smite with the steel of justice. The primitive strength was in the arm; the modern strength in the brain. Though it had shifted ground, the struggle was the same old struggle. As of old time, men still fought for the mastery of the earth and the delights thereof. But the sword had given way to the ledger; the mail-clad baron to the soft-garbed industrial lord, and the centre of imperial political power to the seat of commercial exchanges. The modern will had destroyed the ancient brute. ”

“ How does that man feel who meets another whom he has cruelly robbed, or whose home he has basely dishonoured? But, for all this, I confess with shame that I am overflowing with faults. My imagination is too vivid, and my temper is choleric when suddenly thwarted and opposed in ridiculously small matters: a false accusation or a false suspicion drives me mad. ”

“ Will you suffer them to insult your understanding, and to stamp you as incorrigible fools, with impunity? This, indeed, is one of the cases in which we do not know what to admire most—the towering impudence of the imposters, or the unfathomable stupidity of the victims. ”

“ A satanic spirit of rebellion seems to have possessed you today. The fool pleases me, me, his king, and if I like him, how dare you say that he has no taste? You are the court scholar and he the court jester; each of you receives the same salary; the only difference is that he is dining at the little table with the foreign hunter. The jester plays the fool as we dine, while you entertain us with intelligent conversation ”

“ If an action for libel or slander cannot be maintained, how can such an action as I have mentioned be maintained, it being in truth an action for defamation in an altered form? Every objection and every reason, which can be urged against an action for libel or slander, will equally apply against the suggested form of action. ”

“ Blackstone says, that "if a person publishes what is improper, mischievous, or illegal, he must take the consequences of his own temerity;" and Lord Chief Baron Comyns defines libel as "a contumely, or reproach, published to the defamation of the Government, of a magistrate, or of a private person."—Now, I beseech you to consider the words, mischievous, improper, illegal, contumely, reproach, or defamation. ”

“ Whether we are reviewing the actions of ourselves or of others, what we seem to do, in the first instance, is to refer them to some class, or associate them with certain actions of a similar kind which are familiar to us, and, then, when their character has thus been determined, they excite the appropriate feeling of approbation or disapprobation, praise or censure. Thus, as soon as we have realised that a statement is a lie or an act is fraudulent, we at once experience a feeling of indignation or disgust at the person who has made the statement or committed the act. ”

“ There were no courts, no constables, and the practice of bluff was sometimes worked to the limit. Sometimes the bluff would fail and often a desperate fight would follow.
"Well, pard," said one of the leaders, after a private parley with some members of his party, "we ain't here to hunt other people's stock, and we ain't afraid of nobody, but mebbe there is some misunderstanding about this thing and we are willin' to see if we can't find your oxen. Now, what do they look like?" "You bring me eight good oxen," replied Hill, "and I reckon they'll be mine." ”

“ Laughter broke from them. It spread into a roar of acclamation; for bluff is a weapon dear to every adventurer. ”

“ And then most folks are so darn crooked themselves that they expect a fellow to do a little lying, so if I was fool enough to never whoop the ante I'd get the credit for lying anyway! In self-defense I got to toot my own horn, like a lawyer defending a client—his bounden duty, ain't it, to bring out the poor dub's good points? ”

“ But that will be a common topic for the advocate of the defence to use, by which he will express indignation that the accuser not only alters facts in order to bring him into danger, but that he attempts also to alter words. For those common topics which are assumed either for the purpose of demonstrating the falsehood of the accusations of the prosecutor, or for exciting pity, or for expressing indignation at an action, or for the purpose of deterring people from showing pity, are derived from the magnitude of the danger, not from the nature of the cause. ”