most crabbed

But in the new “now,” we are beginning to see judges push back against the most crabbed and noxious methodologies of originalism, which hold that robed lawyers make for better historians than actual historians, or that it is somehow uninteresting or unimportant when the original meaning of a law replicates the subordination inflicted by its authors.

At its core is one of the most crabbed conceptions of liberty ever penned by a Supreme Court justice.

In this time when writing long letters was everyday practice, men of normal sensibility saw these cards as the most crabbed of media, little better than telegrams, but to Prendergast this square of stiff paper was a vehicle that gave him a voice in the skyscrapers and mansions of the city.

He was a Philistine, no doubt, but he was right; a good, sensible sonata of Haydn's—nay, the stiffest, driest, most wooden fugue ever written by the most crabbed professor of counterpoint would have been far more satisfactory for people who expected music.

But with what a gusto he would describe his favourite authors, Donne or Sir Philip Sidney, and call their most crabbed passages delicious.