Word: overwrought
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Biographer Washburn hazards no opinion about Lydia Pinkham's belief in her own invention, thinks her opportunism may have been socially useful. "The overwrought key of the advertising, its appeal to beware of vague symptoms, such as the blues and dissatisfaction with life, and the hysterical note of the testimonials, suggest that the Vegetable Compound cured that additional weakness that was largely psychic. Who is to say it may not have done this job as well as psychoanalysis...
Lightning rod of the modern press is the news-camera man. Most persons who are subjected to unwelcome publicity see the wisdom of treating reporters civilly. But let a camera click and click goes something in the overwrought subject's brain. If anyone is going to get hit it is the camera man. During the past fortnight, press lightning rods had the following experiences...
...basis of modern detective fiction, he clearly attached no importance to frightening people and wasted no time on realism. What kept him writing was his naive pleasure in being mysterious. Director Basil Dean has retained Doyle's point of view wonderfully well, so that instead of an overwrought modern thriller The Return of Sherlock Holmes is good fun. Obviously relishing his role as the author relished his mysteries, Clive Brook, wearing sideburns, in a woolen hat and old-fashioned loungesuits, knows just how to handle the Sherlockian pipe, as crooked and heavy as a revolver...
...author has observed it. In "Men Without Women", Mr. Hemingway presents a collection of fourteen short stories. Their protagonists are variously toreadors, snow birds, prize fighters, and other less important people. All the tales are tense, highly nervous situations, but in writing them. Mr. Hemingway does not himself become overwrought: with fine restraint, with a knife-like humor, the author recounts the tragedies and failures of his characters. He writes in the simplest possible terms, in starling pictures, as clear and sharp as snap-shots. In the dialogue, Mr. Hemingway maintains the tempo of his stories: exciting it is, intense...
Thus did the overwrought Nation* begin its obsequies over another long-lost cause. In Boston, less hysterical people than the Nation's editor went about the sorry business of disposing of the bodies of Messrs. Sacco & Vanzetti and the practical business of keeping martrydom alive with yet more litigation...