Smoking Out the Smokers

These days, pipes, cigars, and cigarillos are taking an increasing share of the tobacco sales, while the popularity of non-filter cigarettes has declined precipitously in recent years.

Yet the Surgeon General's report on the hazards of smoking has hardly meant the last gasp for filtered cigarettes.

More filtered cigarettes are now sold each year than the year before. Demon nicotine seems to have secured a niche in the American way of life.

And, by the way, it was Europe—not the United States—that developed the filter cigarette. America only lays claim to the invention of the smoker's cough.

If you tried to pay the month's rent or your bus fare with cigarettes, people would laugh at you.

But in pre-Revolutionary America, tobacco was acceptable legal tender in several Southern colonies. Virginia even enacted a law that taxes should be payed in tobacco.

Snow is not frozen rain. Snowflakes change directly from water vapor into snow, without going through an intermediary stage as rain.

An ostrich cannot fly, but the 400-pound bird can outrun many racehorses.

The term drawing room has nothing to do with sketching. The word drawing is actually a shortening of withdrawing—for this was the room to which guests "withdrew."

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