The word "dicky" is informal and can be used in written English, but it may not be appropriate in all contexts.
It is often used to describe something that is unreliable or not functioning properly. Example: "The old car has a dicky engine that keeps stalling." Alternatives include "faulty" or "unreliable."
Set a year on from Tony Blair's crushing defeat at the next general election, it follows the fortunes of the incoming Tory prime minister, who is beset by international crises, treacherous colleagues and a dicky heart.
The day may not be far off, then, when a dicky heart can be serviced in mid-life and made good for a few more years.
Born with a dicky heart, his protagonist was not supposed to live past the age of 30.
As I was receiving treatment and strapping for blood on the touchline I heard, in a very strong Gloucester accent: "Capsules go in your gob, kid, not your dicky ear".
I've never understood its value and Lord Bragg told me last week that he thought it was a "bit dicky".
Two years ago, an almost unrecognisable Mickey Rourke virtually played himself in The Wrestler, about an old grunt'n'groaner with a dicky heart who refuses to succumb to a new career behind a sausage counter.
Apart from speaking to MUTV, and rights broadcasters in the Premier and Champions League, Rooney is not required to say a dicky bird, clothed or otherwise.
Bacri, meanwhile, hovered with his shirt crumpled, mandatory dicky bow conspicuously missing, five o'clock shadow that was heading for the wee small hours, and an expression suggesting he'd just dined on a bad pickle.
However, it's easy to wind up looking like a period piece in an ultratraditional dicky-bowed evening look.
The tie Rebecca: Keeping things classic with an LBD – that's little black dicky-bow, obvs.
It's a great line, and a stylish one (Beckett was, among other things, one of the great dicky-bowed prose stylists of the twentieth century), but its suggestion that there is something fraudulent about literary eloquence is a corrosive one.
