Craftyness

Like all men not really up to their job, he was a stickler for externals and petty quotidian things; and in lieu of an intellect he had accumulated an armoury of capitalized key-words like Discipline and Tradition and Responsibility.  If I ever dared - I seldom did - to argue with him, he would produce one of these totem words and cosh me with it as no doubt in similar circumstances he quelled his subalterns.  If one still refused to lie down and die, he lost, or loosed, his temper.

John Fowles- The Magus.