pfft.

n.  a muffled gunshot, as with a silencer; see also phfft.

<I shot the Picasso first.  The silencer went “Pfft” and the .45 hollow point blew the canvas in half.  —James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia.> <The faint pfft, pfft of a silenced rifle reached her ear, and she knew in that instant, rolling to roadside boulders for cover, that Ismael was not dead.  —Ted Dekker, A Man Called Blessed.>

n.  a mystical understanding of aloneness, likened to being a seemingly inconsequential drop of water in the ocean.

<[A]loneness makes us just a drop of water in the immensity of the ocean—just pfft, that’s all.  Simultaneously, aloneness is not aloneness, because that drop of water extends everywhere in the immensity of the ocean.  So if we understand real aloneness, we can be free from it.  —Dainin Katagiri, Returning to Silence.>

n.  a spray from an aerosol can.

<Every soft stroke from the society is like the pfft of an aerosol can as it eats up a few more atoms of our brain’s delicate ozone, and furthers our personal cretinization.  —John Updike, More Matter: Essays and Criticism.>

n.  a stifled laugh, as when laughing to oneself in The Polish Officer: A Novel by Alan Furst.

<Madoc knew the Archbishop’s words were meant to make him smile, and the more he thought about it the funnier it become.  “Pfft!” he said, managing not to choke and to keep a straight face.  —Anna Lee Waldo, Circle of Stars.>

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