Long perplexed by the seemingly random usage of "in front of my nose" versus "in front of my very nose," I was ultimately driven to consult all back issues of the Berliner Zeitschrift für Otolaryngologie at the medical section of the Harvard U. Library system. Then, Bd. 47, 9 Juli 1919, seemed like a good place to begin in earnest, viz. our standard study by O. Furchtbarer-Nasendreck, M.D., Dr. Phil. on 4725 Psychiatric (?) patients in the Berliner Institut named after him — a study that, first of all, isolated a Typus A and Typus B that encouraged me. If my painstaking translation is accurate, there was a statistically significant finding—although his staff’s methodologies of obtaining sufficient exudate samples aren’t entirely clear to me—that one type of nose, without exception, always exhibited precisely two (2.0) nostrils, while the other type was reliably limited to a pair. The remaining conclusions appeared relatively nebulous to me, but I believe my ongoing search to sniff out the ultimate truth has now been pointed forward.
Katzenjammer Kidd, PhD
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