The Plain-Speech Debate in Pipe Language

The plain-speech debate in pipe language is a line of criticism that has grown out of the rapid expansion of the vocabulary pipe and tobacco enthusiasts use among themselves in recent years. The debate targets not century-old technical terms but mainly the adjectives, abbreviations, and borrowed concepts from other fields that have sprung up in forum posts and marketing copy over the last three or four decades. For a detailed breakdown of the terms, see the Pipe Terminology Glossary entry.

Old Slang: The Nineteenth-Century Tobacco Vocabulary

Tobacco producing its own slang is nothing new. Cope's Tobacco Plant, published by Cope Bros & Co in Liverpool from 1870 to 1881, was a periodical that gathered everything to do with tobacco, and, according to reports, an 1880 issue carried an article addressing slang directly. Slang dictionaries record snout, weed, and old rope as words for tobacco; the long-stemmed clay pipe was popularly known as yard of clay. A good example of terms not meaning what they appear to is the entry "Her Majesty's Tobacco Pipe" in John S. Farmer and W. E. Henley's 1893 compilation Slang and Its Analogues: the phrase has nothing to do with a pipe at all, and instead describes the furnace where confiscated customs tobacco was burned.

The same century also produced examples that inflated terminology with humour. The Anatomy of Tobacco, which Arthur Machen published in 1884 under the pen name Leolinus Siluriensis, borrows the scholastic manner of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy to divide pipe smoking into pseudo-academic categories; the classification that reportedly calls a pipe "simple" if made of a single material and "compound" if made of several also comes from this book. The academic cataloguing of folk names is found in Katherine T. Kell's 1966 survey "Folk Names for Tobacco," published in the Journal of American Folklore.

New Terms and Their Origins

The origins of a portion of today's vocabulary can be traced individually. Kapnismology (the study of smoke) and its derivatives are words coined from Greek by C. Bruce Spencer, founder of the quarterly Pipe Smoker magazine, which began publishing in the spring of 1983; they were introduced in the magazine's spring 1984 issue. Though the magazine, published under the Chattanooga-based Pipe Collectors International, ceased in 1988, the term remained in use. Lunting (walking while smoking a pipe) is far older: it appears in John Mactaggart's 1824 work The Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia, and its origin is traced to the Dutch word lont, meaning fuse. Calamology, proposed for the study of pipe smoking, never caught on.

Another cluster comes directly from trade language and carries a contested definition: estate for a secondhand pipe, new old stock (NOS) for stock that has sat on shelves unsold, vintage with no clearly defined age threshold, and museum quality with no clearly defined standard. The first of these is treated separately in the The Concept of an Estate Pipe entry. Cellaring, describing the long-term storage of tobacco, comes from the word for basement, though storage has no necessary connection to a basement; the topic is detailed under tobacco aging. A third cluster was born in forum discussions: DGT (finishing a half-smoked bowl hours, even days, later), POTD (pipe of the day), PAD and TAD (the urge to accumulate pipes and tobacco). The name given to the taste of previously smoked tobacco lingering in a pipe, ghosting, has the Turkish equivalent hayalet aroma.

Two Views

Two approaches face off within the community. Defenders of the terms argue that every field of interest eventually produces its own shortcuts; these words stand in for long explanations and speed up correspondence among enthusiasts. The opposing side argues that most of these words say nothing new, and are often just fancier ways of saying "old" or "used"; part of the same criticism holds that the terms serve sales copy and that the pile-up of abbreviations builds a wall between newcomers and the rest. The best-known statement of this second view is an article by antique pipe researcher Ben Rapaport, published on Pipedia. The debate itself is nothing new either: at the end of the nineteenth century, the British press was already issuing similar warnings that a slang word should sit for a long probationary period before being admitted to the dictionary.