In 1922, Englishman Howard Carter found the tomb of an Egyptian king named Tutankhamen. Some reports say that above the entrance to the tomb, a curse was written:“Death shall come on swift wings to him who disturbs the peace of the king.”Carter ignored the curse. He and his friend Lord Carvarvon broke into the tomb. They found an amazing collection of treasure and three mummies. 

       A few months later, Lord Carvarvon, aged 57, got sick and died. The doctor didn’t know the exact cause of his death, but said perhaps it was from an infection started by an insect bite. It’s said that when he died, there was a short power outage and all of the lights throughout Cairo went out. At his home back in England, his favorite dog howled and dropped dead. 

       Even more strange, when the mummy of Tutankhamen was unwrapped in 1925, it was found to have a wound on the left cheek in exactly the same position as the insect bite on Carvarvon that led to his death. 

       Reporters quickly developed the story. By 1935, they claimed that 21 deaths were due to the “Munmmy’s Curse”. However, according to Herbert E. Winlock the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, by 1934, only eight people directly connected to the tomb had died. Indeed, Howard Carter, the man who actually opened the tomb, lived to almost 65 before dying of natural causes. 

       But perhaps some connection did exist. In 1999, a German scientist suggested that the deaths were possibly caused by mold—extremely small, dangerous growths that can survive for thousands of years, even in a dark, dry tomb. For this reason, archeologists now wear special masks and gloves when unwrapping a mummy. 

       Imagine the solitude felt by Marie Smith before she died earlier this year in her native Alaska, at 89. She was the last person who knew the language of the Eyak people as a mothertongue. Or imagine Ned Mandrell, who died in 1974—he was the last native speaker of Manx. In remote parts of the world, dozens more people are on the point of taking to their graves so that a system of communication will never be recorded or reconstructed. 

       Should anyone lose sleep over the fact that many tongues are in danger of suffering a similar fate? Compared with groups who advocate saving animals or trees, campaigners who advovcate preserving languages are themselves a rare breed. But they are trying both to impede and publicize an alarming acceleration in the rate at which languages are vanishing. Of some 6, 900 tongues spoken in the world today, some 50% to 90% could be gone by the end of the century. In Africa, at least 300 languages are in near-term danger, and 200 more have died recently or are on the verge of death. Some 145 languages are threatened in East and Southeast Asia. 

       Some languages even face a threat in the shape of certain political powers bent on imposing a majority tongue. A youngster in any part of France soon realized that whatever you spoke at home, mastering French was the key to success. Nor did English reach its present global status without ruthless tactics. In years past, Americans, Canadians and Australians took native children away from their families to be raised at boarding schools where English rules. 

       The result is a growing list of tongues spoken only by white-haired elders. For instance, Njerep, one of 31 endangered languages in Cameroon, reportedly has only four speakers left, all over 60. The valleys of the Cauncansus used to be a paradise for linguists in search of unusual syntax, but Ubykh, one of the region’s mysterious tongues, officially expired in 1992. 

       The American screen has long been a smoky place, at least since 1942. Now, Voyager, in which Bette Davis and Paul Henreid showed how to make a romantic deal over a pair of cigarettes. Today cigarettes are the most common on screen: 75% of Hollywood films show tobacco use, according to a recent survey by the University of California, San Francisco. 

       Audiences, especially kids, are taking notice. Recent studies have found that among children as young as 10, those exposed to the most screen smoking are up to 2.7 times as likely as others to pick up the habit. Worse, it’s the ones from non-smoking homes who are hit the hardest. 

       Now the Harvard School of Public Health （HSPH）—the folks behind the U.S. designateddriver campaign—are pushing to get the smokes off the screen. “We’re in the business of preventing disease, and cigarettes are the No. 1 preventable cause,” says Barry Bloom, HSPH’s dean. “A possible way to do it is to expose them to enough good examples.” That’s why the designated-driver concept caught on in the 1980s, when Harvard and the ad agencies persuaded TV networks to slip the idea into their shows. “The idea appeared in 160 prime-time episodes over four years and drunk-driving fatalities fell 25% over the next three years.” 

       Harvard long believed that getting cigarettes out of movies could have as powerful an effect, but it wouldn’t be easy. Cigarette makers had a history of striking product-placement deals with Hollywood, and while the 1998 tobacco settlement prevents that, nothing stops directors from incorporating smoking into scenes on their own. 

       In 1999 Harvard began holding one-on-one meetings with studio execs trying to change that. Harvard’s advice was clear: Get the butts entirely out, or at least make smoking unappealing. A few films provide a glimpse of what a no-smoking or low-smoking Hollywood would be like. Such movies are hardly the rule, but the pressure is growing. Like smokers, studios may conclude that quitting the habit is not just a lot healthier but also a lot smarter.