Word: peevish
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...worried. He wrote: "What may be clear to an American élite may be less clear to the majority in Congress and, a fortiori, to the mass of electors. . . . There are plenty of people in America for whom Europe is a sort of lunatic asylum, a basket full of peevish crabs...
Violent and prolonged anger can play havoc with body tissues, said Dr. Harold G. Wolff of Cornell Medical College. A furious man - or even a peevish one who constantly takes umbrage - gets too much blood in his stomach walls; if he stays angry too long, ulcers may result. The fury or sulking fits aroused by threats to a man's life or his love, said Dr. Wolff, sometimes affects his nose: it may swell up and hurt. A "mad" nose, caught with its resistance down, is easy prey to colds and other infections...
...might be worrying itself fretful over the high prices; it might be peevish over strikes or jittery about Communists. But the millions of Europe's war-ravaged continent had a more realistic view: America was still the great land of promise. In Greece, the U.S. embassy had enough applications to fill the immigration quota (307 a year) for 99 years...
Nightclub patrons are often sullen and quarrelsome. Overtime workers frequently have peevish dispositions. Can this bad temper be traced to lack of sleep...
Potshots and Self-Pity. A typical Chekhov study of frustration, the play is over, in a sense, before it starts: all that is left to most of its people is recriminations and regrets. A selfish mediocrity whose family pampered him and thought him great, Professor Serebryakou is peevish now for having got nowhere, for having got old. Middleaged, rust-covered Vanya -who has sacrificed his life to the professor and declared too late his love for the professor's shallow, pretty wife-wallows in self-pity, and when finally roused to rage takes potshots at the professor-and misses...