Word: overwrought
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...jumped, Jake concocted one story. Then last week he tried another story. Mrs. Kasenkina had seen "a crowd running from the Hotel Pierre towards the consulate," he said, and it had frightened her. He said she was depressed by the "malicious fabrications" of the U.S. press and overwrought by "threats of the United States police" to haul her into court "by force." Mrs. Kasenkina had already said from her hospital bed that she had jumped to escape Jake...
...Human Endurance. The color of my meditations depends somewhat on the time of day. Every morning at 6 I cry sleepily, "Oh, God, let me die! I cannot face it!" After breakfast, I trudge up the hill wondering how I can bear to face the brats, racking my overwrought brain as to how I can keep each class busy throughout the long, long day. Every evening I come home full of wonderful stories, some funny, some sad as hell, and filled with new ideas on how to get an idea into the poor little heads. Then, after dishes, I start...
...take many years of such episodes to turn the young girl into a half-hysterical bundle of nerves. She became morbidly religious, wore spiked necklaces to mortify her flesh, built altars in the woods. She lived in a dreamworld peopled with overwrought heroes and heroines. But when her grandmother died, 18-year-old Aurore promptly married Casimir Dudevant, whom acid Poet Heinrich Heine later described as having "the tepid vulgarity, the banal nullity, the porcelain stare of a Chinese pagoda...
...Happen? In 1865 a Lon don Athenaeum critic was vexed by a new book called Alice in Wonderland - "a stiff, overwrought story," he complained, which would make "any real child more puzzled than enchanted." In 1932, when Alice invaded the Chinese province of Hunan, the sensitive provincial war lord was even more shocked. "Bears, lions, and other beasts cannot use a human language," he barked, and banned Alice as "an insult to the human race." In 1936, an eminent Austrian psychiatrist recoiled, shuddering, before Alice's "oral sadistic traits of cannibalism" and "continuous threat to the integrity...
...critics were excited not so much by Conductor Shaw's musicianship as by the way he held the minutest control over his singers. Gesticulating with feverish intensity, Conductor Shaw suggested a cross between Arturo Toscanini and an overwrought college cheerleader. By the time he had finished, a hand-picked audience agreed that his Collegiate Chorale was one of the finest...