Thanks. I sort of almost majored in English in college (besides being a native English speaker) and didn't even realize the distinction there (i.e. "robbery" implies force).
It's one of those things that bugs me about the early chapters of the novel Nine Princes in Amber:
He glared at me, I don't know how long.
Finally, "I haven't got a thousand here," he said.
"Name a compromise figure," I said.
After another pause, "It's larceny."
"Not if it's cash-and-carry, Charlie. So, call it."
"I might have five hundred in my safe."
"Get it."
Larceny is what happened to RMS, and I like to just remember it as "walking off with someone's pen" -- maybe a bit of an extreme example, but if you mentally call that "larceny" in your internal classification you more easily remember what larceny is.
Anyway, in the above case Corwin ("I") does in fact have a gun pointed at the doctor ("he") -- albeit the doctor's own gun -- and arguably that's dangerous enough that it goes from being "larceny" to outright robbery.
