Smog

[laughs]

And here's a domestic one: Morning in the Smog.

[laughs]

Are they bottling it now?

And I lived through the coal to nuclear transition, meaning we used to have a lot of coal plants in Hamilton.

Smog would blow over the city.

And we had 62 smog days per year.

And I had asthma.

Wow.

Smog was that bad.

But the second time I was there was in 2008 for the Olympic Games.

And it was completely different.

By the early 1900s, citizens were demanding cleaner air, and the word smog had already become symbolic of industrial excess.

That kind of linguistic shift shows how language can amplify public pressure.

Smog became a rallying point for environmental reform.

When you look at the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of smog appears in the late 1860s.

But it wasn't until the 1930s that dictionaries began to treat it as a standard noun.

The term helped shape early air quality legislation.

Lawmakers used smog to quantify the problem and justify regulations.

Smog was a concrete target for smog alarms in London that eventually led to the Clean Air Act of 1956.