Word: sniff
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...many spend much more-but he is not considered a luxury. The increasing complexity of management, the shortened life of many products, the expansion and specialization of markets-all have made necessary the presence of a man who can detach himself from the problems of the present to sniff out the opportunities of the future. The corporate planner is often on a vice-presidential level and usually paid well. His function is to look ahead for as far as ten or 15 years, outpredicting customers and competitors, plotting new products, new markets and new mergers and spying the social, political...
...even more vividly than the heat or the building boom. "I like the aura of optimism everybody has here," says a new arrival. "Everybody thinks he can do the job that's put to him, and he goes about it in a happy manner." In other cities, citizens sniff foul air and worry about pollution; in Houston, they savor the pungent odor that wafts from the refineries and chemical plants and cheerfully call it "the smell of money...
...that range from fondness for overworked students to earnest boosterism ("We must stimulate interest in Shakespeare"). Such benevolence is subject to whim: sudden crackdowns make one year's gut next year's skull-cracker. Thus, each fall the avid "gut-seeker," as Harvard calls him, has to sniff out anew the telltale signs: heavy class attendance, especially by football players, and a proneness to refer to the course in slang, such as "Spots and Dots" (modern art), "Cops and Robbers" (criminology), "Pots and Pans" (homemaking), "Nuts and Sluts'' (abnormal personality), "Cokes and Smokes" (religion...
Some Britons who tend to demand new station houses and an end to deficits in the same breath sniff at "Dr. Beeching's bitter pills." Totally unruffled by criticism, Beeching says his goal is to convert the railways from "a political shuttlecock" into a lean, efficient business. Should he do it, Beeching would achieve distinction as a bureaucrat who disobeyed Parkinson's Law and actually managed to diminish a bureaucracy...
Ritual Bite. Sometimes a wolf appears to be eating Dr. Ginsburg, but its play bites are only a ritualistic greeting. Wolves say hello, explains Ginsburg, by nipping each other's muzzles. So he greets his research subjects the same way. "We sniff at each other," he says, "and then the wolf takes my face in his jaws. I bite him back, but since my jaws aren't big enough, I bring my hands up to grasp his muzzle. This seems to be satisfactory...