Word: smog
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
After seven games of a losing streak that knocked the National League-leading Los Angeles Dodgers back into second place, the gloom of players, fans, and sympathetic local sportswriters was slightly thicker than the city's smog. But in the Los Angeles Times, Sports Columnist James Murray could regard the home team's travail with wry humor. "What was happening to the Dodgers," wrote Murray, "could only be described as a slump if you think of what happened to General Custer as a slump. I have seen happier people on the end of a rope than the Dodgers...
WAIF & SAFE. H. L. Mencken called attention to the native U.S. talent for "reducing complex concepts to starkest abbreviations." From O.K. to K.O., Americans have long coined initial-born words. But what began as playful sport has turned into contagion and verbal smog (smoke and fog). Just to describe the new rash of alphabetease, linguists were forced to invent a new word: acronym (from the Greek akros for tip, onyma for name), which first appeared in dictionaries in 1947. Most insidious breeders are public relations experts, adept at spawning the punch word that sums up an organization, then...
...many U.S. cities, blue skies are less common than they once were, and smarting eyes a chronic complaint. Air pollution is no respecter of size; more than 10,000 U.S. communities are afflicted to some degree. Most U.S. smog is of the eye-irritating "Los Angeles type," composed primarily of nitrous oxides and petroleum products loosely known as hydrocarbons, much of it traceable directly to automobile exhausts. Every day in the Los Angeles basin, more than 12,500 tons of pollutants are discharged (80% by autos) into the air-and without the city's severe industrial controls, the daily...
...smog a health menace? Says Los Angeles' Dr. Paul Kotin: "There is no question that it is not good for you." Kotin himself has produced cancers in rats and mice by painting their bodies with smog components. Natural exposure to smog has caused scarring in the lungs of laboratory animals, and inhalation of sulphur-dioxide fumes produces "airways resistance" (inhibited replenishment of the blood's oxygen supply) in both guinea pigs and humans. In London, where the word smog originated, chronic bronchitis-emphysema, an irreversible pulmonary disorder that can cause eventual heart failure, is now the third biggest...
...unhappy truth is that scientists still know very little about smog's effects on human health. Many doctors suspect that exposure to polluted air over a period of years, like habitual cigarette smoking, probably produces serious pulmonary disease. But, explains Dr. Walsh McDermott of Cornell University Medical College, the kind of long-term study needed to prove this hypothesis is "not particularly fashionable" among scientists who prefer to delve into more dramatic fields of research. The extent of the menace is undetermined, but it nevertheless exists. Says Dr. McDermott: "We can continue to breathe what is very probably toxic...