Word: peevish
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...only approve," wrote Pascal in one of the more peevish passages of his Pensées, "of those who groan aloud in their search for the truth." Literature, from Greek tragedy to T. S. Eliot, has been vastly benefited by truth-seekers who could out-groan a Maine fog horn; but it has also had to put up with a host of novelists and poets who forget that the surest way to ruin a good groan is to work it to death and stuff its remains into the machinery of their writing...
...improve him. He was prematurely an irascible and peevish old man, according to Bainton. He railed against both the rival Protestant sects and the Jews. He talked a blue streak, some of it the plain vulgarity of his generation, and lorded it crudely over his congregation: "You ungrateful beasts, you are not worthy of the treasure of the gospel. If you don't improve, I will stop preaching rather than cast pearls before swine...
...second time in a year, gangsters dynamited the $100.000 Brentwood, Calif, villa of Hollywood Mobster Mickey Cohen, 38. Mickey and his wife, LaVonne, who were asleep in another room at the time, were unhurt. But the neighbors were getting a little peevish over all the racket made by Mickey's playmates...
Franco was still beaming next day as he gave Abdullah a spectacular public embrace. Madrid declared a national holiday the better to welcome the royal guest. One peevish cobbler grumbled: "Haven't we enough saints' days which keep us from working without a Moorish king thrown in as well...
...cheer his massive, scholarly and readable American Language as the best thing of its kind. At another extreme, his autobiographical books (Happy Days, Newspaper Days, Heathen Days) are among the most engaging of any in U.S. writing. During the past decade his writings and utterances have tended toward peevish and irresponsible flailings of men and politics. But he has seldom hit below the belt and has never used the stab in the back. Whatever his justifications, he struck, as Critic Gerald Johnson once said, right between the eyes...