Word: smelling
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Another specific job is to warn of thi approach of war gas, so there is a committee called the Union Feminine Civique et Sociale which trains women sniffers (flaireuses) to detect nearly odorless gasses by smell without getting killed by taking too deep a whiff...
This quality, however, is perhaps necessary to the grandeur of the total effect. Sandburg's prose is mostly direct, savored, terse, with scarcely a perfunctory or a pretentious sentence. If it had a smell it would be leaf smoke on an Illinois dirt road in November. Closely-knit to the material, it has almost none of the lyric blurring of The Prairie Years (where he wrote of Nancy Hanks as "sad with sorrow like dark stars in blue mist"). Because Sandburg has been compared often to Walt Whitman, his mature portrait of Walt is instructive: "Undersized, with graying whiskers...
...They used to sprinkle beer from a watering can on the sidewalks outside the barroom to bring in the young. The smell tempted them inside. That's the way it should be with literature and poetry in college...
Suddenly a terrifying Something, big and black, bobbed up from behind a boulder. It was Author Sanderson's shadow. The cave's incline steepened; he slid down & down. The darkness and rank smell thickened. Then he was standing among the carcasses of old crabs that had crawled down there to die. A half-buried hearth revealed charcoal; around it were large bones-a fugitive's, perhaps...
...cliffs. Several weatherbeaten shacks, a pier or two, boats and nets hung up to dry, comprise the weary picture. Almost no motion is apparent. Everywhere are rocks and mosquitoes and marshes extending as far as the eye can see. And smothering the scene like a heavy blanket is the smell of drying and decaying fish. For it is summer and the people who cling precariously to the shoreline are codfishing for existence...