The word "shifty" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to describe someone whose behavior is suspicious, or someone who is trying to avoid giving a direct answer. For example: "The way he avoided answering my question made me suspicious - he was being really shifty."
But he got the nod only after the other front-runner, Susan Rice, America's ambassador to the UN, withdrew her bid in the face of a Republican onslaught against her "shifty" reaction to the attack in Libya.
But in the Czech Republic the disastrous experience with an incentive program that produced a solar-energy boom in 2009 and 2010, straining the state budget as a flood of shifty startup firms sprang up to exploit it, made such a guarantee politically unviable.
Such workers could earn up to euro25,000 a year, taxed at a nominal rate of 10%, while still getting unemployment benefit for up to three years, though they would have to pay welfare contributions.Despite its recent broad condemnation of the proposals, the conservative opposition's reaction has been shifty.
Bank accounts have been frozen and shifty charities scrutinised; this week, America revealed that it was seeking the extradition from Germany of two Yemenis accused of raising money for al-Qaeda, much of it in Brooklyn, New York.
It is not only back-street firms that seem shifty.
Being a journalist, he looks shifty.
Mr Blair managed to appear shifty.
Whereas Lewis invokes similarity, which is relative to contextually shifting respects, Fara invokes sortal sameness, which is less shifty.
But the few grim-faced men hanging around platform at Poznań, eyeing passengers with shifty gazes, might have given something away, had I paid them enough attention.
