Word: taut
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...this subject his audience was more taut. When Molotov promised that Russia would have "atomic energy and many other things," the party leaders cheered until bells rang to stop them...
...NUMBER CAN PLAY-Edward Harris Heth-Harper ($2.50). This taut tale of what happened one night in big-time Charley King's midwestern gambling house will give ordinary bridge and poker fans a rough notion of the fever that throbs in a sure-enough gambler's veins. Of that momentous night when Charley had his triumph-and his comeuppance-Wisconsin-born Author Heth has made a fast-moving short novel. His slightly lopsided characters look startlingly real in the smoky, harshly lit room where little Bergson sweats over, a two-bit bet and a stranger's trembling...
...classic plot can never be entirely dull, but Playwright Job has made things seem unnecessarily oldfashioned. As sheer melodrama, Thérèse doesn't pump up enough action; otiose characters keep chattering their heads off. It doesn't pack enough suspense: there is no taut atmosphere of guilty tongue-slips and sharp, suspicious glances...
Beside that ardently swelling literary bosom, the lean, taut, fidgety figure of the author of Main Street, Babbitt and Arrowsmith might seem a little out of place and even a little out of date. For a decade Lewis had favored U.S. readers with a book almost every biennium, but his last important work had been done in the beginning of the '30s. If Cass Timberlane now acquired new importance, that was chiefly due to the fact that the hundreds of thousands of men & women who would read his new novel had, while he was writing it, made...
...Indian arrow poison curare (rhymes with safari) is sometimes used in abdominal surgery and in spastic paralysis, to relax taut muscles. But doctors have not generally liked it much, because an overdose will kill a patient...