Word: sniff
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Like their ursine cousins in the U.S. national parks, the bears eat almost anything and have learned that where man is, there shall garbage be also. On almost any mid-autumn day, bears can be spotted foraging in Churchill's town dump. They often come closer in, to sniff around cabins and houses, even parked cars and vans, if they think there may be a snack inside. Polars vie with Kodiak bears for the title of largest land-based carnivore in the world. A full-grown male can weigh more than 1,600 Ibs. (vs. grizzlies...
...identify perspiration odors of their mates. Schleidt tested 75 couples in West Germany, Italy and Japan, asking them to wear cotton T shirts to bed for a week and avoid using perfumes or deodorants. In all three sets of tests, results were the same: subjects were generally able to sniff out the shirts worn by their mates, and both men and women considered male odors more unpleasant than female odors. But when women selected the shirts they thought belonged to their husbands, only the Japanese women labeled the odors more unpleasant than their own. Why should women of Japan...
...than buy blue and white scarves (the Official Yale Scarf, incidentally, is manufactured in Harvard Square), carve their initials into the tables down at Mory's, import girls for football weekends. Harvard was more worldly than that, initiating academic, political and social trends which Yale could only sniff at or copy (or both...
Bleats of unchecked egoism are now so commonplace that self-glorification may be well on the way to becoming standard American style. Yet such an epidemic of flagrant braggadocio would have scandalized the country not long ago. Most Americans have always felt, as many still feel, dutybound to sniff at the ostentatious chest thumper and look down on all public boasting. Brazen self-admiration has never been considered criminal, nor necessarily degenerate, but it has always been judged tacky - poor form, at best. Good form has always required reticence about one's virtues. To think well of oneself...
...hollow, hollow as Japanese lanterns, hollow as tennis balls, hollow as black parachutes drifting through the night sky. We are money and beauty, expensive costumes, argyle sweaters and flannel knickers. We lust for the naked girl in the private railway car that streaks by on a summer night. We sniff at the air, spicing our senses with the scent of golden pine needles that drop like errant arrows to the forest floor...