WordWealth: tetchy

tetch·y , adj. tetch·i·er, tetch·i·est.

This strategic adjustment of reality is the process of inflation and conflation summed up by Ivy Compton-Burnett: "People in life hardly seem to be definite enough to appear in print. They are not good or bad enough, or clever or stupid enough, or comic or pitiful enough."--Waugh's tetchy and combative personality made him a difficult companion at arms. His reputation with fellow officers and superiors was shaky. A laconic editorial footnote in the diaries quotes a letter from a commanding officer: "Nobody wished to have him ... he was the cause of constant trouble." But what Waugh effectively did, when it came to the fictional translation of his experience, was to bleach himself out of the picture.—— Penelope Lively; 'A Maverick Historian'; Rarely has comedy of manners been so artfully infused with pathos as in Evelyn Waugh's recently reissued Sword of Honour trilogy: "the finest work of fiction in English," our author argues, "to emerge from World War II"; The Atlantic, Feb 2001

Churchill hated being underground so much that he only used the dining room three times, preferring instead to take his meals and daily bottle of champagne in his quarters at 10 Downing Street. But he did begrudgingly agree to sleep in in the bunker from where he worked regularly until 3am.--The complex, which opened in 1941, offers a snapshot of life at the nerve centre of the British war effort, right down to specially silenced typewriters ordered by the notoriously tetchy prime minister because he could not stand noise. —— Cahal Milmo; Revealed: Churchill's Spartan Second World War Quarters Gets Overhaul; Independent; March 6, 2003

His every word was pure gold then, and even the chairman, who is not known to hide his light under a bushel, got a little tetchy being asked to opine on every economic subject known to man. —— Jamie Dettmer; 'Greenspan Doesn't Always Get It Right'; Insight on the News, February 26, 2001

Synonyms: cranky, irascible, irritable, surly.

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