Word: overwrought
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...embarks on a different course. For more than 25 years, Françoise Sagan has published brief, ironic tales of love lost or betrayed. She is a supremely confident writer, both in her resolute economy of style and in her command of the milieu she describes: the frivolous, overwrought bourgeois society where emotion can be both teased and indulged...
Both books first appeared as lengthy serializations in The New Yorker at the beginning of the year. Schell's is a sequel to his 1982 bestseller The Fate of the Earth. That work received widespread praise for its passionate, sometimes overwrought meditation on the madness of mutual assured destruction (MAD). Schell argued that the apocalyptic nature of nuclear war had rendered obsolete not only war itself but the concept of national sovereignty. He called on the superpowers to eliminate nuclear weapons and to "reinvent politics" by creating a world government loosely based on the pacifist ideals of Mahatma Gandhi...
...Gabriel/Anderson collaboration, "Excellent Birds," is the only major mistake on this album. With its obvious, snappy chord changes, its overwrought vocals, its melody which sounds like something off of Security, and its pointless lyrics fashioned in the David Byrre made, this song indicates what could have happened in the whole album had Anderson limited her African influences to very surface surface level...
...writer/lyricists Calnek and Alison Taylor have infused some much-needed variety into these overwrought proceedings. For one thing, they've varied their targets of satire a little. There is not, for a wonder, a single and compulsive joke, even after Missionary Position and Witch Wayzup join forces. (You might still think twice about inviting your parents, though.) A certain eclecticism is apparent: Not only do the maidens pray "Boola boola, Eli Yale," but Wayzup laments, "Hath not a witch eyes...
...people saying this. He has written his enormous biography to prove the unprovable-that Steinbeck wrote many splendid novels before and after The Grapes of Wrath, justifying the Nobel Prize he received in 1962. Benson's admirations exclude only East of Eden; the biographer finds it stilted and overwrought. If Steinbeck did not produce as many great novels as he should have, Benson blames his editor or his agent and, above all, the critics, who kept asking for more Grapes...