The word 'raffish' is correct and usable in written English.
It is an adjective that means unconventional, disreputable or slightly unkempt in a stylish or charming way. Example: The actor had a raffish charm that made him stand out in the audition room.
Once a popular hangout among artists and writers, from Paul Bowles to Allen Ginsberg and Matisse, who loved the raffish air and wild, drug-fuelled parties, the city had fallen out of favour since its Fifties' heyday as travellers headed to Marrakesh, but things look set to change.
The finishing touch was a small felt cap, which I was required to wear at a raffish angle.
A gentleman steeplechaser who belongs to what his son calls "Hobohemia", a "raffish subdivision of the upper class", his principal hang-out is David Tennant's notorious Gargoyle Club in Soho, also a haunt of Dylan Thomas.Although neither of Mr Mount's parents has any money, the idea of getting a job never occurs to them.
Experimenting with lifestyles as well as creeds, he tried respectability as an advertising executive, and a more bohemian life in the raffish expatriate scene of North Africa.Returning from Morocco to his home city, he was shocked by the harsh anonymity of life in the urban West.
All of which sits a tad oddly with the raffish behaviour of the writers especially those of a generation ago.In this section Poverty in America Bone appartee!
His popularity has always owed more to his raffish, well-rounded personality than to his views.I suspect that Mr Clarke has come to conflate defying the Tory right (something he rejoices in) with appealing to the national centre-ground.
Hellman always credited him with teaching her how to write, showing her how to craft distinctive characters with just a few lines of raffish dialogue.
Since the early 1990s Shanghai has been driven by a desire to reclaim its pre-communist era status as a regional financial capital and a cosmopolitan haven for international capitalists eager to penetrate the Chinese market that lavish but raffish world immortalised in Vicki Baum's novel, "Shanghai '37".
Bills of exchange More at home abroad A la recherche des champs perdus ReprintsBy the 1970s, however, raffish Sydney had come into its own, and it has outstripped Melbourne ever since as the favoured headquarters of businesses and cultural bodies.
His son, Bo Guagua, is now studying at Harvard University after a stint at Oxford where his raffish behaviour, caught on camera, became an internet sensation in China (notwithstanding the censors' best efforts).The new leftDespite such diversions, Mr Bo is a darling of China's "leftists".
His mother, a music teacher, was from an English family—"raffish, up and down", he calls it that had been in Mexico since the 18th century.As a teenager, he was taken up by the European surrealists who had congregated in Mexico city, very much as an expatriate clique that did not bother to learn Spanish.
