Sentence:  I asked Quasimodo recently how he accomplished this , and he replied that he had painted his model `` a beautiful shade of red and then had her breathe on the canvas '' , which <WSD>was</WSD> his typical tongue-in-cheek way of chiding me for my lack of sensitivity . 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  have the quality of being; (copula, used with an adjective or a predicate noun)