chippy
adj.— «Speaking of Tennessee, things have gotten a touch shall we say “chippy” between your team and the Tennessee Titans, with whom there’s been a little bit of a verbal jousting going on this week.» —“Del Rio excited about new acquisition” NFL.com Nov. 13, 2003. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Ophelia in Johnson City, Tennessee, wonders about the exclamation her great-grandmother often used when something surprised her: Cat bristle! That may be her own version of a minced oath, although it fits with the idea of how a cat’s tail might look...