Word of the Day

crabwise \KRAB-wyz\,
adjective:
1. Sideways.
2. In a cautiously indirect manner.

Grass tells this story in awkward fashion, coming at it crabwise indeed, with hesitations, shifts of direction, and out of sequence, allowing his narrator to display his own confusion, uncertainty, resentment of a history that has deformed his own life.-- Allan Massie, review of Crabwalk, by Gunter Grass, The Scotsman, April 5, 2003

Atwood moves crabwise through such questions as the place of moral or ideological content in art, the conflict between artistic purity and commercial necessity, and the nature of the relationship between writer, text and reader.-- Christopher Tayler, review of Negotiating with the Dead, by Margaret Atwood, Sunday Telegraph, March 10, 2002