overwrought

• He was ill and overwrought, and small things became magnified out of all proportion to their actual importance. —  The Life of George Borrow
• But she was overwrought, and it was imperative that she stay calm. —  TheKouvarisMarriage
• With some surprise one finds that there is a gradual movement away from the overwrought, adjective-drenched style that first comes to mind when one recalls Lovecraft, to a later, contemplative style Joshi describes as an amalgam of eighteenth-century stateliness, the “atmospheric floridity” of Poe and Wilde, and the careful formulations of philosophic writing. —  FSF,July2005
• Byron's very brief account of an aborted journey to Ephesus lacks the nightmarish clarity and frank ghoulishness of Potocki's work; it's at once tepid and overwrought, and brought to its unsavory, unsatisfactory conclusion by the untimely demise of Augustus Darvell. —  FSF,August2005
• The trailer for the overwrought (and fictional) drug-gangster film was screened to hoots of laughter from the assembled TV writers.

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