faze /FAYZ/. verb. To perturb, disturb, unsettle or fluster. Unrelated to phase (from the Greek phainein, to show), with which it is commonly confused—see the Mark Twain example below—faze derives from the dialectal feeze(to alarm or frighten), from Old English fēsian (to drive away, to banish).
“His spirit?—why, it wasn’t even phased.” (Mark Twain)
“Peter and Don each did the same from down below, hooking their arms around her legs. It was a most awkward, animalistic position, and yet Peter found that it didn’t faze him in the least to be doing this.” (Elisabeth Hyde)
“It doesn’t faze me when my dreams are interrupted; they’re so gentle that I keep dreaming them as I speak…” (Fernando Pessoa)
“…while we
who think we know where we are going unfazed
end up in brilliant woods, nourished more than we can know
by the unexpectedness of ice and stars
and crackling tears…”
(John Ashbery)
“Red-Eyed Randy stands close to ArmedCompanion, who has the unfazed expression of a professional boxer challenged to a fight by a drunken nightclub bouncer.” (Nuruddin Farah)
“Babette, who was trying to be an actress, had a whole gaggle of friends from the restaurant where she worked who wore a lot of leather and went en masse to some S&M bar in the West Village on weekends. It didn’t seem as though prostitution would faze Babette…” (Mary Gaitskill)
“It’s been that way my whole life; first for being fat, then for being famous, and now for not being fat orfamous. So it really doesn’t faze me. Life’s one big freak show.” (Meg Wolitzer)
“This underlines that loving is not marrying and it is quite difficult to understand how love can become duty. But paradoxes do not faze Kierkegaard: his whole essay on marriage is an attempt to elucidate this mystery.” (Simone De Beauvoir)
“I let her know that murder was one of the things they would cover anyway, so she had better be ready for it when she went on the stand. It didn’t faze her any. She seemed to have almost forgotten that there was a murder…” (James M. Cain)
“Sure, they can handle murder, a couple of homicides don’t faze them; but to have their shining knight, their big War Hero, show up with this brazen trollop and her four little bastards is too much for their Presbyterian eyebrows.” (Truman Capote)