The pirates appear rather to be shifty characters and tell long tall tales to Guybrush when pressed for information.

Archie does have a suggestion, a shifty character nicknamed Tabby, who would probably commit petty larceny in public for a couple of hundred bucks.

Soon shifty characters were stopping by, officials said, peddling stolen goods that were worth millions of dollars.

They are a bunch of shifty characters.

David Paluck's ever-shifting portrayal of a shifty character makes it clear that he is not a villain, that we cannot hate him.

In the past, he had delighted in wielding a kind of cabalistic power, which he undoubtedly possessed, over many a weak or shifty character.

The shifty character was getting extremely agitated, waving his arms about and almost bursting into tears.

"Ventura will hunt down answers, plunging viewers into a world of secret meetings, midnight surveillance, shifty characters and dark forces," truTV said in a statement.

But the idea that he might be playing with language - representing talk itself and the shifty character of words - is perfectly fine.

History is full of shifty characters, antique visionaries, cusp figures and half-crazy oddball innovators, later overlooked because they're hard to pigeonhole.