Word: nervous
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...surgery worked, restored much of the hearing in his left ear. In the old hearing-aid days, Johnnie was unsure of rhythm and pitch, developed a habit of sliding into his notes. With his hearing restored, he promptly became panicky. "That first night," he says, "I was a nervous wreck. After my first show I rushed backstage and said to the other guys: 'O.K., now tell me I wasn't singing flat.' They said: 'No, you were singing up a storm...
...goes for ten or fifteen minutes. Total strangers confronting total strangers, making nervous small talk with artificial poise, watching through narrow eyes for the wrong color of socks, a grammatical slip or affectation, a pun or wisecrack in questionable taste. Then...
Wang is personally an inconspicuous, soft-spoken, highly nervous Chinese. Born in Shanghai some twenty-six years ago, he came to America in 1949 to study. He wasted a year in pre-med studies at Dartmouth, but graduated with a B.A. in 1955. He claims to have worked on The Dartmouth Quarterly, The Dart, and to have been president of the Dartmouth Cosmopolitan Club, where, he asserts, he "encouraged the exchange of ideas and knowledge among the races." His class poem was censored by college officials, towards many of whom he holds an undying hatred...
...collective gullet of The Lambs' club. As for the problem of delineating character, it is solved simply. Characters express emotion by changing color-from pink to grey, scarlet, dull red and "glistening" chalk white, until the fascinated reader feels like the chameleon, which is said to become a nervous wreck when nudged across a plaid bedspread...
Clemente, Author Soldati's hero, is a shy, pimply, touchy, clever, nervous adolescent who finds it more difficult to chin the inflexible horizontal bar of manhood than do the dull louts whom he outshines in class but cannot outrun on the playground. At first sight, the problem seems ordinary. Should Clemente yield himself to the incitements of his wakening sexuality or keep himself a fit vessel of grace? As Soldati tells it, Clemente's sex proliferates through his veins like the roots of a tree under a marble pavement...