impishness

impish | American Dictionary

impish
adjective
us/ˈɪm·pɪʃ/
suggesting behavior that is playful but likely to upset other people:
He had an impish grin on his face.

Examples of impish

impish
I remember her genuine sincerity, her attentive eye contact and her almost impish smile, which seemed always close to the surface, yet broke open from somewhere deep within.
The system is so fiendishly opaque as to be essentially impossible to learn, yet there is an impish playfulness in its interplay of historical phonology and information encoding.
Crick writes a plain reasonable prose which he interlards with occasional glints of passion and impish or caustic asides.
Especially did he scorn-though with impish humour-the (dualistic) notion of the existence of a 'devil' who puts spokes in the wheel of the almighty.
Only informal situations, ignorance, sheer sloppiness or an impish desire to take linguistic liberties might make us use forms that might otherwise not be regarded as acceptable.
Nunn, we are told, inspired loyalty 'with sharp intelligence, impish sense of humour, and apparently inexhaustible ability to talk at length without respite for breath or rumination'.
He asked a lot of impish questions about pricing policy.
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