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.