If you ever had the opportunity to watch Michael Jordan in his prime--swishing a three-pointer or just jogging down the court after a free throw--you know what sprezzatura is.

Unlike most of the terms in our Glossary, whose roots can be traced to Latin or Greek, sprezzatura is an Italian word. It was coined in 1528 by Baldassare Castiglione in his guide to ideal courtly behavior, Il Cortegiano (in English, The Courtier).

A true aristocrat, Castiglione insisted, should preserve one's composure in all circumstances, even the most trying, and behave in company with an unaffected nonchalance and effortless dignity. Such nonchalance he called sprezzatura. Or, as we might say, "Don't ever let 'em see you sweat."

In part, it's what Rudyard Kipling evokes in the opening of his poem "If": "If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs." Yet it's also related to the old saw, "If you can fake sincerity, you've got it made" and to the oxymoronic expression, "Act naturally."

So what does sprezzatura have to do with composition? Some might say that it's the writer's ultimate goal: after struggling with a sentence, a paragraph, an essay--revising and editing, again and again--finding at last the right words and fashioning those words in precisely the right way.

When that happens, after so much labor, the writing appears effortless. Good writers, like good athletes, make it look easy. That's what being cool is all about. That's sprezzatura.