Word: uptightness
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Only one student said people changed their estimation of him because he had been in a mental hospital. "They were very straight, very uptight people," he said. "They just did not know how to handle the situation. One of my roommates treated me very gingerly, as if he were afraid of me. The other regarded me voyeuristically, and was offensively solicitous about everything...
...theme. It all flaps as loosely (and engagingly) as the gossip columns of a small-town newspaper. The author obediently follows the ancient code of the village novelist. Her spinsters come in only two styles: dotty or drunk. Her clergyman predictably wrestles with doubt. The young girls are either uptight virgins or "fast." Most of the time the novel seems to take place-and to be written-around the turn of the century...
...gleeful Newsweek article that usually makes us think ten times before saying anything. It is impossible to talk to anyone over thirty. Think of the last few times you tried. Think of the time you tried to tell your parents why you were unhappy and why Harvard made you uptight, and that maybe it wasn't just adolescent growing pains or if its was they were a lot profounder than anybody imagined...
...Registration Day for Freshmen, we began queueing up very early in front of Memorial Hall. I was bout a third of the way down the line. In the front was a Negro fellow with wonderful yellow sunglasses, except that I did not think they were wonderful then, being uptight (a word I learned later) and trying very hard to be a Harvard freshman. First it was sideburns --- Marty claims he was the first one in the freshman class with sideburns, but Marty, who is married now, always claimed such things. Then, it was wire-rimmed glasses. On our floor...
...inhumanly cool, cruel irony convey the impression of barely repressed personal rancor, such as a son might feel in trying to discuss his father. Perhaps this, and the fact that it is set in the 1930s, is what makes Mr. Bridge more than an objective caricature of the uptight WASP personality so often under attack today. What emerges is a muted image of an American type as pure, enduring and applicable as George F. Babbitt ever was. Mr. Bridge's unwitting and rather dated dilemma, Connell suggests, is capable of pointing a lesson for today. The old, defensive virtues...