Word: taut
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...their stay as genteel innkeepers. Fortyish Bart Hunter is an existentially minded drunkard whose most cutting insult is to call someone "cheerful." His disillusioned wife Sylvia once took him for a big social cheese, but now knows him for an ineffectual mouse. Their son John, a taut, brooding boy of 14, and his nondescript little sister round out the unhappy Hunter clan...
...felt free: "I feel hemmed in." With a posse of reporters yelping at their heels, Leopold and lawyer hopped into a rented car and dashed off toward Chicago. New to high-speed driving, Leopold, a diabetic, stopped six times en route, vomited on roadside grass as cameras clicked. Later, taut-nerved Nathan Leopold flew to New York and on to Puerto Rico, at his destination said humbly: "You can't imagine how happy...
...votes that could be lost by cutting family allowances, retorted that the amount involved was trifling-less than 1% of the projected budget. The showdown came at a late-night Cabinet meeting at 10 Downing Street. Peter Thorneycroft found all 17 of the other ministers present arrayed against him. Taut and white-faced, he announced that the Prime Minister would have his resignation forthwith...
...Rome last week a taut, red-faced man with an angry glint in his eye called in New York Times Correspondent Paul Hofmann and unburdened himself of a bitter complaint. "The Americans," said he, "have done a nasty thing to Italy in Libya...
...repertory. As Norma, the Druid priestess, Callas came before her audience looking strikingly handsome in flowing robes, her dark hair aglitter with silver leaves. Midway in the first act, when she launched into the opera's most famed aria, Casta Diva, the house was hushed in taut expectancy. All of the familiar intensity was there, and the first notes were luminously clear. But as the aria moved into the upper registers, the voice seemed to darken and tremble. The audience responded with a mixture of hisses and bravos. Callas lifted one thin arm in a furious gesture of contempt...