The dialogue goes from the vernacular to purely functional to nervily lowdown fast talk.

Nervily, the girl ignored the gun that The Shadow whipped from his cloak.

Variety magazine wrote that the film "nervily tries to update the formula (of the 1986 original).

Then he nervily denounced the charges and gave his colleagues an ethics lecture he should have been the last to deliver.

Even Pedro, pattering nervily about the room, seemed more restless than usual, and when he slept his dreams were troubled.

When he did so, he nervily chose a spot close by one of the few lamp posts; then turned about to announce the destination.

Spurs nervily scramble it clear.

He waited nervily for a response, crouched down with his hands between his thighs like a catcher between pitches.

"I want to look like Hugh Grant," announces one young English toff, nervily jovial.

The machine shuddered and the Aero-Mobile slipped nervily sideways. . . . Suddenly the engine cut out.

Business Week came up with a zinger in its list of the best-paid C.E.O.'s, nervily comparing executive compensation against corporate profits.

If the subject is delicate or unspoken, you can bet that New Jersey Repertory will bet on the play that nervily confronts it.

David Bamber transforms the merchant Antonio into a self-hating homosexual who winces, squirms and nervily forces his face into ingratiating displays of fake humor.

Chauvelin felt as if he were choking; his slender fingers worked nervily around his cravat; beads of perspiration trickled unheeded down his pallid forehead.

Sara Pasti has nervily piggybacked a second group show onto Ms. Sandrow's with "195-120 Front Street: A Multiple-Dwelling of the Mind."

Purposeful yet oddly furtive, they exchange fleeting glances with a man in a shabby windbreaker who lurks in a shadowed doorway, nervily alert to the approach of a transit police car.

Or as the Hungarian director nervily asserts in the film's production notes, "We people living today have done all we can to put ourselves in mortal danger and only a miracle can save us."

Its very title nervily riffs on the unforgettable title of the premier exhibition of Conceptual and Process Art, Harald Szeemann's "When Attitudes Become Form," at the Kunsthaus Zurich in 1969.

And, most nervily, "London's Brilliant Parade" crosses a whimsical Kinks song like "Waterloo Sunset" with some Beatle-y psychedelia, as Mr. Costello offers a rambling, impressionistic walking tour of London.

"Young Adolf" deals, nervily, with an imaginary sojourn in England by the youthful Hitler; "The Birthday Boys" considers the ill-fated Scott expedition to Antarctica; "Watson's Apology" exhumes a Victorian murder.

And beyond dubious business ethics, the novel's denouement hangs upon the rather up-to-date dilemma of whether April Wheeler can raise her consciousness enough to nervily defy her husband, break ranks and terminate a pregnancy she fears will ruin her life.

Nothing confirms the stature of artists more clearly than the way they tackle the potboilers of the repertory, and here as soloist in the Grieg Piano Concerto we had another artist who can be unpredictable, sometimes nervily so, Radu Lupu.

Aeneas - a hero lamed by having to put "I must" before "I will" - is sung by Jon Vickers, an artist who could convey weakness with force, and strength with prevarication, his ardor being at once steely and nervily uncertain.

Mr. Pollini can also be charming, as in his high-speed, exhilarated "Les Collines d'Anacapri" or his nervily brilliant "La Danse de Puck," and he puts all his sophistication at the service of simplicity in "La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin."