prickly

Covered with sharp points.

• The prickly pear is a cactus; you have to peel it before eating it to remove the spines and the tough skin.

Easily irritated; thorny.figuratively

• He has a prickly personality. He doesn't get along with people because he is easily set off.

Difficult; complicated; hairy or thorny.figuratively

• It was a prickly situation.

In a prickly manner.

• Striding across stage in his bright white jacket, his voice soaring and cracking – like Charlie Parker’s – he was nervous but prickly eloquent, caustic yet encouraging.

Something that gives a pricking sensation; a sharp object.colloquial

• Below, way out on the flat, Blue had seen a light green that could be graze but up here was nothing 'cept all kinds of prickly bushes, and too many of them. Ground-spreading pricklies that reached out to jump at a horse's belly […]
• Dad, I need to ride on your shoulders because the pricklies hurt my feet.

A person who favours formal, structured, organized settings.US

• Planned variation was based on systematically applying different educational approaches developed by academic experts, each of whom was to become a "sponsor" of a single type of program – from highly structured classroom models, sometimes c
• Alan Watts says that these two types may be named the "prickly" people and the "gooey" people. The pricklies, he says, the Marthas, are tough-minded, rigorous, and precise and like to stress differences and divisions between things. The goo