Battiness is apparently the best friend of innocence.)

Rather than being alarmed at their battiness, the president naïvely admires what he sees as bravado.

Battiness - premature senility of some sort - seemed the most probable explanation of the whole affair.

In the opening, for example, a middle-aged British wife with a battiness akin to Margaret Rutherford's reads from an old guidebook.

My life unrolled before me, a life distanced and remote from the world around me, a life trapped in my own deepening battiness.

The studio also instilled some of Bugs Bunny's savvy into the duck, making him as brilliant with his mouth as he was with his battiness.

Mary Beth Hurt pumps commanding battiness into a mock-erotic monologue attesting to the devaluation of Joycean stream of consciousness in the linguistic age of "Dynasty."

Unusual, perhaps, tiresome to his office - but if the strange behaviour at which his daughter had hinted was really a sort of battiness, the office would have made its own arrangements to get by.

The casual plot becomes an occasion for the dextrous Mr. Ackroyd to combine the chatter of Chelsea and the battiness of Bloomsbury with the ghostly presences of languishing artists and lovelorn women.

She may have been conceived as Alfie's batty granny but Hilda Braid injected a steely and unnerving sweetness into the role that made you wonder if Nana wore her battiness as a protective flak jacket."

Singer also manages to channel the collective battiness of a group of men in Texas trying to retrieve the long-gone skull of Pancho Villa; and of another comic bunch, all acolytes of the movie cowboy Tom Mix, without mockery or condescension.