Bellicose:
Demonstrating aggression and willingness to fight.
‘a mood of bellicose jingoism’ [Oxford Dictionaries]
While it’s not a rare word, if perhaps a trifle uncommon in casual discourse, the source reference appears to be pulling in its horns. My first reference was in in “‘Fire and fury’ not to be taken seriously, say aides: Trump was just in ‘a bellicose mood’,” by Hunter on The Daily Kos, where he quotes The New York Times:
No worries, then: Trump’s vow that North Korea would see “fire and fury like the world has never seen” was, according to aides, merely an unsupervised utterance of the presidential word-hole.
Among those taken by surprise, they said, was John F. Kelly, the retired four-star Marine general who has just taken over as White House chief of staff and has been with the president at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., for his working vacation.The president had been told about a Washington Post story on North Korea’s progress in miniaturizing nuclear warheads so that they could fit on top of a ballistic missile, and was in a bellicose mood, according to a person who spoke with him before he made the statement.
That’s a good word. “Bellicose.”
But the linked NYT story does not contain the word. A bad link? A little searching then yielded this WaPo story by Gary Sargent, “Happy Hour Roundup,” in the Plum Line column:
The president had been told about a Washington Post story on North Korea’s progress in miniaturizing nuclear warheads so that they could fit on top of a ballistic missile, and was in a bellicose mood, according to a person who spoke with him before he made the statement. His team assumed that he would be asked about North Korea during a scheduled media appearance tied to his opioid meeting, but Mr. Trump had not mentioned his comment during a conference call beforehand that focused on North Korea.
A bellicose mood? Sounds like a good basis for an American president to decide whether it’s sound strategy to threaten a rival country with nuclear annihilation.
This column linked to this NYT story, “Trump’s Threat to North Korea Was Improvised,” but, again, the word bellicose is not present.
Apparently bellicose is on the outs at The New York Times.
