The Vintage Reader

I'm on an email list that has several frequent posters from the UK, and this morning one of them used a word I really like: cross. As in "I'm feeling quite cross today." It used to be part of my vocabulary because I read a lot of English books from the 60s by authors like Elizabeth Caddell and Margery Sharp, but it drifted away. That's a shame, because sometimes it's exactly the right word to describe how I feel: quite cross. Not quite angry, not exactly irritated, not even miffed--just cross.

I'm not particularly cross right now, but next time I am I hope I will remember it.