Crossword-Solution: CURMUDGEONLY 12 letters, 88 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 21

She vowed it was done curmudgeonly to vex her, because her uncle hated wedding-presents and had grunted at the exhibition of cups and saucers, and this and that beautiful service, and epergnes and inkstands, mirrors, knives and forks, dressing-cases, and the whole mighty category.

Name it, heartily, pleasure; and in contempt of the moralist burgess, praise the dance of a woman and the man together high over a curmudgeonly humping solitariness, that won't forgive an injury, nurses rancour, smacks itself in the face, because it can't--to use the old schoolboy words--take a licking! These were the huddled, drunken sensations and thoughts entertained by Weyburn, without his reflecting on the detachment from his old hero, of which they were the sign.

Sir Jervas Vereker is--Sir Jervas." "You seem to know my uncle rather well." "I did--for my name besides Anthony is Vere-Manville!" Here he paused as expecting some comment but finding me silent, continued: "My father was killed with Sir John Moore, at Corunna, and I was brought up by a curmudgeonly uncle, the most preposterous unavuncular uncle that ever bullied a defenceless nephew to the dogs.

Not a word in response to all this eloquence, Balder? Positively your behavior appears rather curmudgeonly than heroic! You stand gazing at your relative with almost as much fixedness as he returns your stare withal.

Now, to insist on chronological exactitude and draw inferences from its absence is--one admits most cheerfully, and more than admits--a mere curmudgeonly pedantry in most cases of great or good fiction, prose or verse.