Citations:owliness

Noun: "the condition of being an owl or having owllike characteristics"

 * 1970 — Leonard Baskin, Baskin: Sculpture, Drawings & Prints, George Braziller (1970), ISBN 9780807605776, pages 16-17:
 * My owls of night and ignorance, genitaled and sexless, hulking, brooding, wailing and screeching, distorted into my vision of aggressive predatory tyranny. But I aver that it is my company of owls that carries the generalized meaning as hostile and vicious tyrannizing predators. And if an occasional owl slips away from that horrific sodality and asserts its pure owliness, I do not and cannot decry or deny its right.
 * 1989 — Darrel E. Levi, Michael Manley: The Making of a Leader, Andre Deutsch (1989), ISBN 9780233984728, page 13:
 * His mother Edna, a tremendously talented visual artist driven by a sometimes semi-mystical desire to portray the essence of things (the owliness of the owl, for example), had an even more profound effect on Manley.
 * 2007 — Richard Benke, City of Stone, University of New Mexico Press (2007), ISBN 9780826341518, page 21:
 * Wye raised an eyebrow, set a card on the counter identifying himself as David Persham, and left quietly. Crossed Highway 12 to the Best Western Wise Owl Motel.
 * Full circle. Wye woke the clerk with one question. "What's all this owliness?"
 * The clerk, an ex-logger, was always game to talk owls.
 * 2011 — Louise Rennison, Withering Tights, HarperTeen (2011), ISBN 9780061799310, page 217:
 * Like Monty had told us, I thought about the "qualities" of owliness. My wise nature. Where my home might be. What I would have for supper. Mouse, I fancied.

Noun: "the state of being in an ill temper; crankiness"

 * 1979 — Ian Dutton, "Weather was cool, but teams' tempers weren't", The Leader-Post, 10 August 1979:
 * The teams obviously studied at the Hatfield-McCoy school of diplomacy and graduating at the top of his class in owliness was Eston playing-coach Don Sasser.
 * 1986 — "I love you, friend, here's your hat", Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 12 April 1986:
 * It has fractured hundreds of friendships and wrecked thousands of marriages because of the cranky behavior of one or both of the partners on the way home, or by their owliness the next morning and God knows what other failures in between.
 * 1994 — Garrison Keillor, "This country needs a good laugh", Wilmington Morning Star, 30 May 1994:
 * Now fat people are considered disabled, there are programs for owliness, and everyone who leaves the house in the morning carries a note from his Inner Mom saying, "Be gentle to my boy, he has Been Through a Lot."
 * 2000 — Garrison Keillor, "My Day at the Clinic", Time, 28 August 2000:
 * You tell all your interesting troubles to the examining physician, and he or she routes you to the appropriate shamans and gurus--to cardiology or the department of digital prostate examinations or the hiccup guy or the specialist in owliness--and it may take several days to get a thorough checkup, the emphasis being on thoroughness.