Both Uses
ornery
in
Parrot in the Oven
(Auto-generated)
- Then Little Tommy, looking ornery and offended, huffed over and planted his bony chest against mine.
Chpt 2. *ornery = easily annoyed and quick to complain and argue
- There were a lot of ornery vatos around, but they just hung around and smoked and ditched class and acted like the school was some kind of contaminated nuclear zone.†
Chpt 7.
Definitions:
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(1)
(ornery as in: is ornery when she first wakes up) quick to get annoyed, complain, argue, and be uncooperative
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(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) Much more rarely (and seldom any more), ornery can describe someone as "low down", coarse, or unrefined. Mark Twain often used the word in that manner as in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn where he wrote: "The other fellow was about thirty, and dressed about as ornery." and "The more I studied about this the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling."