Word: hypochondriac
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...monthly raise so he could buy more cigarettes. Between noisy puffs, he chews melon seeds or peanuts. Until recently, when his doctors made him slow up, he used to wash down his heavy meals with kaoliang (grain liquor). Since then Mao has become something of a hypochondriac...
...acceptable shows. The D'Oyly Carte group has a technicolor version of "The Mikado" that does as well as a movie on Gilbert and Sullivan. Laurence Oliver's "Hamlet" is something not to be missed; seats are reserved, and must be arranged for beforehand. "Sorry, Wrong Number" features a hypochondriac Barbara Stanwyck and various unsavory additions of the great original radio play...
...hypochondriac, he is always conscious of drafts. He himself has had four serious illnesses; his first wife suffered from tuberculosis and his elder daughter died of it. His wife, his daughter and his mother all died within a year. Says he, with misty eyes: "There were three coffins in my apartment that year. It became quite impossible...
...about it. Grandfather West, crusty and conservative owner of a powerful chain of magazines, looks at first to Dixon like a threat to the good life, and finally seems like the man to emulate. Dixon's father is a boozy weakling; mother is a sentimental hypochondriac. Mig Holmes, the handsome body Dixon finally marries, is a near-dipsomaniac widow of good family but dwindling fortune...
Most famed neurotic of all was Shelley. A brooding hypochondriac (Nicolson says flatly: "All creative writers are hypochondriacs . . . all creative writers are nervous"), Shelley was long obsessed with the conviction that he had tuberculosis. Once, overcome by the thought that he had caught elephantiasis from a lady with thick legs, he fell on the floor and writhed with an imagined attack of the disease. On another occasion he had a hallucination that he had seen a baby rise from the sea and clap its hands at him. But Nicolson insists that Shelley was "on the whole" sane: "After all, even...