In a word: minatory

Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a moderately obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar — another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word:

MINATORY

No doubt you had such a teacher as Mrs. Jessie Perkins. She taught me in the fifth and sixth grades, and when she stood at the blackboard, illustrated a point of grammar or arithmetic, and said, "That's all there is to it," fixing us with a look that brooked no dissent, we shrank from her minatory gaze.

Minatory (pronounced MIN-uh-tor-ee) means expressing or conveying a threat, or, only somewhat more lightly, having a menacing quality. The etymology is from the late Latin minatorius, from minari, "to threaten."

Example: In Mine All Mine by Adam Davies: We ... start circling each other in deep kung-fu stances, making threatening movements -- dog-paddle punches, minatory half-kicks."