Word: sneezer
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...over," and connotes amazement or dread of supernatural forces beyond one's control. Rationalists scorn superstition as a hangover of primitive man's obsolete interpretations of the world. Indeed, nothing seems sillier nowadays than rituals like knocking on wood or chanting "God bless you!" (to prevent the sneezer's soul from flying away). Even so, modern behavioral scientists respect superstition as an enduring expression of the human need to master the inexplicable. "One man's superstition is another's religion," contends Anthropologist...
...Blue Eyes. "When a prominent citizen gets jammed up with the rules," he once wrote, "there are always a lot of folks ready to turn on the brine for him. But when some bezark that no one ever heard of gets found out, they rush him off to the sneezer or jail, with never a sob gulped out in his behalf." Yet when two bezarks awaited execution in Massachusetts in 1927, Runyon turned in a story so unsentimental that his editors refused to run it: "They're frying Sacco and Vanzetti in the morning," ran the lead...
...rest of him does not. He looks like a bullfrog. The powerful throat seems to be preparing its organ tones; the wide, traplike mouth is about to open. Meanwhile, the brilliantly modeled eyes focus with disdain upon someone in the back row−whether a sinner or a sneezer. The portrait achieves a quality rare in most places and times, and almost unheard of in its own: immediacy...
...Sneezing, like hiccups, warts and baldness, is richly endowed with popular superstitions and remedies. Aristotle considered a sneeze evidence of the brain's vigor. Ancient Persians believed it to be the draft from the Evil One's wings. Hindus think a sneezer is expelling an evil spirit. Old wives' cures include pulling hairs from the nose, reciting the alphabet backwards, shooting off a revolver...
...sneezing machine--a small, glass-enclosed cage with an atomizing nozzle stuck in one side. Ferrets in the cage got flu after a couple of blasts of the atomizer. Further work with high-speed cameras and other equipment indicated that droplets are expelled from the mouth of a sneezer at the rate of 100 miles per hour; and that flu microbes in the droplets float in the air, well and happy, for as long as half an hour...