The word "cantankerous" is correct and can be used in written English.
You can use it to describe someone who is moody, bad-tempered, or argumentative. For example: "My grandfather is quite cantankerous, and often argues with my grandmother over silly things."
He may be near-deaf, he's getting on, but he remains in boisterous, cantankerous and irrepressible spirit.
In Richard II, Shakespeare referred to it as "this scepter'd isle, this other Eden, demi-paradise, this fortress build by Nature itself", but perhaps what has given the UK its true fertility, particularly in song, is best summed up by that cantankerous cultural figure John Lydon: "Britain is an island; it's always had a constant ebb and flow of immigration – it makes it a better place".
A cantankerous old git he may be, but his final days were full of emotion.
The famously cantankerous Indiana basketball coach joined Letterman shortly after helming the Hoosiers to the NCAA championship.
Over Disney's sweet but slight Feast, I'd have given the win to Daisy Jacobs's visually ingenious The Bigger Picture, which blends stop-motion and Hockney-style painting in its poignant depiction of two brothers caring for their cantankerous mother.
To achieve more rapid growth he will need to introduce a series of big economic reforms, some of which Mr Calderón attempted during his presidency, only to see them get stuck in Mexico's cantankerous Congress.
Buy from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.ukIn this section Beloved bully Leaker's leak A cantankerous crew Death and the machine Talking to terrorists Weird alleyways of culture ReprintsTHERE is an immediacy about Charles Dickens's life, just as there is about his novels, a kind of bursting physicality.
Compared with red-in-tooth-and-claw Westminster, Swedish politics even at its most cantankerous is like a gentle disagreement among friends.
Mr Chesnoff oozes contempt for the French: for their "myopic behaviour and cantankerous character".
On May 23rd a 70-year-old newspaper boss was shot six times in Tegucigalpa, but survived; the previous week, the owner of a television station was murdered.The agreement marks another diplomatic success for Colombia's Juan Manuel Santos, who since becoming president last year has patched up his country's relations with its cantankerous neighbours, Venezuela and Ecuador.
At the very least, he'll have to be bought off with some other big job.In domestic politics, the SPD may now become a more cantankerous coalition partner within Mrs Merkel's government in Berlin, just as the CSU will become a less boisterous coalition partner for a while.
