Answer:
curmudgeonly can be defined as a grumpy behaviour. Someone who has a bad temper. We could replace curmudgeonly by a synonym like grumpy or bad-tempered or simply mean.
Explanation:
Curmudgeonly? What is that?
If you have not seen this word before, then the meaning may be not very clear at the fisrst sentence (The curmudgeonly man was not well liked...), but the second sentence give us a better idea of what it is. Yelling at kids for no reason is an aggresive behaviour that help us understand why he was not well liked. We can infer he was not only friendly with kids, but basically with nobody in the neighborhood. This is why we can conclude the word curmudgeonly can be seen as a word to describe an unfriendly and bad-tempered behaviour.
Ok. Can we use a synonym?
Sure we can. We can make this text more accessible to readers using more common words to replace curmudgeonly. We can use grumpy (like the grumpy cat meme), bad-tempered or also mean if we want to stress He, the neighbour, is a bad person because of his aggresive behaviour.
