Word: overwrought
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...York Daily News or even the National Enquirer, alongside World News Tonight and The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. "I see myself as an alternative vision," says Rivera, "not one dictated by the suits on Sixth Avenue ((Manhattan's network row))." Although his antics often seem self-aggrandizing and overwrought, Geraldo finds the TV universe is big enough...
...computers have mistaken a civilian airliner for an attacking fighter plane? But when the fragmentary results of Rear Admiral William Fogarty's investigation leaked last week, blame fell not on the machines but on the men who were operating them. Under the pressure of combat, Pentagon sources say, the overwrought sailors on the Vincennes misread the radar data about the oncoming Airbus and passed faulty information to Captain Will Rogers III. He then ordered the launching of the two missiles that destroyed the plane, killing all 290 aboard...
Their 18th century exodus from Nova Scotia was immortalized in the overwrought poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Now their cuisine has become democratized into a culinary cliche as even fast-food restaurants offer ersatz renditions of jambalaya and gumbo. Yes, the Cajuns have shouldered their share of suffering. But are these injustices enough to transform the 250,000 descendants of the original Acadian settlers in Louisiana into a minority group eligible for state affirmative-action programs designed for blacks...
...long ago, the class of '88 was braced for a far gloomier situation. When the Dow Jones industrial average plummeted 508 points on Oct. 19, it raised the specter of an economic recession and widespread joblessness. Fearful seniors -- joined by a smattering of overwrought underclassmen -- rushed to college placement offices in search of advice, sometimes creating such a backlog that students had to wait a month or more for an appointment with a counselor. Corporations grew just as edgy: some recruiters put campus visits on hold until they could sort out the aftereffects of the market meltdown...
...plot, such as it is, turns on the attempts of the Madonna character to interpose her own project, an adaptation of a high-flown allegorical novel about the risks of living in an overly technologized world. The opaque and overwrought passages that she quotes sound unfilmable. Yet even if the text is drivel -- and it resonates that way from the stage -- its search for meaning touches some inarticulate longing in the secretary who is given it to read and, eventually, in her boss, who for a while joins her quixotic crusade. He starts out trying to seduce...