Word: overdoing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...best it provides a good occasion to settle accounts, not just with Dickens but with his critics and interpreters. The past century has piled up a long bill of critical complaints that he was sentimental, arch and melodramatic; that he would never do what he could merely overdo. In recent decades, on the other hand, critics have rescued him from his earlier reputation as a hearthside moralist and improvising Toby-jug showman. Readers are now ready to acknowledge with Wilson that Dickens "leaps the century and speaks to our fears, our violence, our trust in the absurd, more than...
...Nixons have used for years. The tree in the family quarters stands on a revolving base that plays Jingle Bells. Outside, for the first time, tiny white lights glow from the boxwoods that line the front driveway. To TIME Correspondent Bonnie Angelo, Mrs. Nixon explained: "You can't overdo at Christmas time. The more the better, so far as I'm concerned...
...expect that soon you will be publishing smoke-room stories; but if and when you do, please check with me. I believe there are only 18 basic ones-so don't overdo...
...slave ship's apparent captain, Don Benito Cereno (William Young), and his apparent slave Babu (James Spruill) fails to compensate for the inappropriate tone. The image of Babu as a happy, able and devoted servant seduces Delano into unwitting contradiction of his American democratic precepts: "Sometimes I think we overdo our talk of freedom./ If you looked into our hearts, we all want slaves...
...prisoners were not expected to survive. Yet Solzhenitsyn also knows, as he says in The First Circle, that "descriptions of prison life tend to overdo the horror of it. Surely it is more frightening when there are no actual horrors; what is terrifying is the unchanging routine year after year. The horror is forgetting that your life?the only life you have?is destroyed, is in your willingness to forgive even some ugly swine of a warder, is in being obsessed with grabbing a big hunk of bread in the prison mess or getting a decent set of underwear when...