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• s  difficult to deal with
• s  of timber; having fibers running irregularly rather than in parallel

• During the past decade, in between chasing butterflies, translating Pushkin (PTI, July 31), and writing his brilliant, cross-grained fiction, he has been bringing to market .
• The cross-grained texture of the intellectual and political history of Western Europe during the '30s and '40s is brilliantly perceived through this gathering of Orwell's .
• After cross-grained old Sewell Avery goaded Wilbur Norton into throwing up the job last spring, no one rushed to apply for it.

• contrarious
• curly-grained
• wavy-grained