Word: overwrought
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...comparison with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. Souls, he insists, have been parched by the enforced loss of mystical Christianity in Mother Russia. Maximov's art is not yet ready for such awesome competition. His novel is a string of craftsmanlike vignettes awash in hyperbole. Emotions are so consistently overwrought that tempestuousness is soon diminished to nagging petulance. Some of the blame may belong to the translation. One Russian greets another with an improbable, hearty "Hallo, Pal" or a "Come on, Boss...
...Victorians as a prototype of the engineer-hero, a 15th century Brunel or Edison who lacked only the omnipotent semen of capital to make his projects real. At the next, the English 19th century aesthete Walter Pater wrote of his mechanical inventions as mere "dreams, thrown off by the overwrought and laboring brain...
...design, which is at first not apparent. Heller departs radically from the style of Catch-22 here. The prose is extremely simple as Slocum introduces himself, due partially to the anti-hero's inhibition. And slowly, through parenthetical remarks and more elaborate, cinematic passages, one becomes aware of an overwrought personality, who has regressed or just never overcome an arrested development in the prepubescent stage...
Squandered Trust. There was as yet no evidence that Ford's motives were other than high-minded and merciful. Indeed, some of the criticisms of his action were overwrought and hysterical. Suggestions that justice was dead in the U.S. or that Ford's Administration had been irrevocably compromised were exaggerations. Nevertheless, Ford's first major decision raised disturbing questions about his judgment and his leadership capabilities, and called into question his competence. He had apparently needlessly, even recklessly, squandered some of that precious public trust that is so vital to every President. By associating himself so personally with the welfare...
...general enthusiasm for it as a stage vehicle. Shakespeare was still an immature playwright when he wrote it, and the quality of the result soars and plunges like a fever chart. Much of the work is too artificial, much of the punning too protracted, much of the diction rhetorically overwrought...