Say you're the typical M.I.T. student, and you've just finished a hideously long problem set, and you have another, but you don't want to dive right in.

'It's I who have been a fool - for five intolerable, hideously long years,' he added softly, gently wiping the tears from her eyes before covering her upturned face with butterfly-light kisses that made her heart sing for joy.

Henri Cain's libretto, in French and effectively adapted from Edmond Rostand's popular play, tells the familiar story of the swashbuckling Cyrano, a guardsman in mid-17th-century Paris, a noble soul afflicted with a hideously long nose.

Sometimes that hideously long face (it obscures most of his body, like the bloated head of a caricature on some newspaper's op-ed page) has two eyes, sometimes just one.

But the papers also printed hideously long casualty listsevery day, and the maps showed that most of the fighting was onConfederate soil.

For a hideously long split-second nothing happened, and then the gun jerked and made a noise like a thunderclap as fire vomited from the end of the barrel.

With things the way they were, that could be a hideously long time.

She also has to wear a set of hideously long fingernails.

Almost in slow motion I sailed up and out of the jet and, for a hideously long second, saw the raw stone of the wall directly in front of me.

It took a hideously long time for the command from his brain (Stand up!