crabbedyoudaoicibaDictYouDict[crabbed 词源字典]
crabbed: [13] Because of their tendency to deploy their pincers at the slightest provocation, and also perhaps because of their sidelong method of locomotion, crabs seem always to have had a reputation for being short-tempered and perverse. Hence the creation of the adjective crabbed, which literally means ‘like a crab’. Its meaning has subsequently been influenced by crab the apple, famous for its sourness. (The semantically similar crabby is a 16th-century formation.)
[crabbed etymology, crabbed origin, 英语词源]
crusty (adj.)youdaoicibaDictYouDict
c. 1400, from crust (n.) + -y (2). Figurative use, of persons, "short-tempered," is from 1560s.
hothead (n.)youdaoicibaDictYouDict
"short-tempered person," 1650s, from hot in the figurative sense + head (n.); Johnson's dictionary also lists hotmouthed "headstrong, ungovernable;" Elizabethan English had hot-brain "hothead" (c. 1600); and Old English had hatheort "anger, rage," literally "hot heart."
snarky (adj.)youdaoicibaDictYouDict
"irritable, short-tempered," 1906, from snark (v.) "to find fault with, nag" (1882), literally "to snort" (1866), from an imitative source akin to Low German snarken, North Frisian snarke, Swedish snarka; and compare snarl (v.2), sneer (v.). Back-formation snark (n.) "caustic, opinionated, and critical rhetoric" is from c.2002 (compare snark (n.)). Related: Snarkily; snarkiness.