Snout, sniff and sneeze: the language of the nose
- Written by Nick Haslam, Professor of Psychology, University of Melbourne

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that language is “fossil poetry”. It is made up, he said, of images which “have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin”. Some of that poetry is on the nose.
An extraordinary number of English words associated with the nose begin with the letters sn-. The organ itself can be...