The merchants began to snuff the cadaverous haut goût of lucrative war; the freighting business never was so lively, on account of the prodigious taking up for transport service: great orders for provisions of all kinds, new clothing for the troops, puts life into the woollen manufactures.

Am I bored? Not a bit of it!

Pollution levels are almost always higher in cities rather than the countryside, what with the cars, industry and so on.

[discussing numquam in the Old French portion of the Oaths of Strasbourg] a Latinizing spelling, maybe a pure Latinism, not surviving in modern French (but cf. Old French onques < umquam ‘ever’). Note the double negative, literally ‘will never make no pact’