Like it or not, vaping is here to stay

‘I never say manifest, brain rot, brat, demure or even enshittification, though I might be tempted by the last one,’ said my husband when I gave him a little list of Words of the Year announced by dictionaries like Oxford, Cambridge and Macquarie (the last one).

These were from 2024 and I wondered if any of them had taken root. I think not. (Manifest is used here as a verb, brat as an adjective – but not by me.) In 2014, though, Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year was vaping. That certainly has been naturalised, with the related form vape. It is not a vogue choice of word or one that must be presented archly in oral inverted commas. The vape shop has supplanted the newsagent and tobacconist, the cigarette kiosk, the cigar shop and the snuff shop.

The OED cites vaping from 1980 to mean inhaling through a nicotine-charged tube. Devices that heats a liquid and produces an aerosol did not come in until the 1990s. Just as vapes used to be called vaporisers, so e-cigarettes used to be called electronic cigarettes. The vapour that gave vapes their name is, in common parlance, a sort of steam. From my first days at school, teachers have tried to make me and my classmates use vapour for the visible steam from kettles. But we still call it steam, like the clouds of vapour from a steam engine. Language is conservative and Venetian vaporetti use no steam at all for their impulsion.

We might even call a boiled gammon smoking, or a broken open baked potato. The reformed Scrooge offered Bob Cratchit a bowl of smoking bishop. It would steam the more richly with the 17th-century spelling smoaking.

Vapours were in the Middle Ages held to rise from the stomach to afflict the brain. In the 18th century, it was common to call depression of spirits the vapours, as did Joseph Addison in the original Spectator, writing of ‘the Spleen, which is so frequent in Men of sedentary Tempers, as well as the Vapours to which those of the other Sex are so often subject’.