Word: sniff
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...mothers or by turning "feminine" characteristics into epithets like "sissy" and worse.Once-honorable words like queen, madam and mistress have, in fact, been tarred with salacious connotations that their male counterparts-king, sir and master-have escaped. Sometimes Miller and Swift's complaints are plain silly. The authors sniff linguistic oppression in the fact that women are said to "marry into" families; the same thing, of course, is said of men when they hitch up to richer or more prominent clans. Prince Phillip "married into" the British royal family. Sargent Shriver did the same to the House of Kennedy...
...area around convention hall. He has 1,200 police who have taken a quickie course in crowd control and what they call "crisis intervention." He also has four specially trained dogs. Every day before the delegates arrive, the dogs will sweep the convention center from top to bottom to sniff out possible bombs...
...complaints about a particular odor within 90 days. If the apparent polluter happens to be an industrial concern, for example, investigators will go to the olfactory−as it were−and collect air directly from the smokestack. Each of the three panelists will then be asked to sniff 20 samples−ten from the smokestack and ten consisting of fresh air. If two of the three noses correctly identify eight of both the smoke and fresh air samples−in other words, if the odor is really noticeable and objectionable−the agency will issue a citation...
...Black Bag." Trying to sniff out subversion, the FBI, the CIA, the Army and the National Security Agency violated Americans' rights over the years by opening some 380,000 first-class letters, staging hundreds of "black bag" break-ins, securing copies of millions of private cables and tapping an unknown number of telephones...
Certainly anyone can respond to recycled banalities masquerading as conversation, an edgy concern with appearances, the nose sniff of gossip and the binocular gaze at just who is where on the money-and-status escalator. Ayckbourn has honed this knowledge to hairbreadth comic precision...