Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 3:

Taking the whiff, it has been suggested, may have been either a swallowing of the smoke, or a retaining it in the throat for a given space of time; but what may be meant by the "Cuban ebolition" or the "euripus" is perhaps best left to the imagination. "Ebolition" is simply a variant of "ebullition," and "ebullition," as applied with burlesque intent to rapid smoking—the vapour bubbling rapidly from the pipe-bowl—is intelligible enough, but why Cuban? "Euripus" was the name, in ancient geography, of the channel between Eubœa (Negropont) and the mainland—a passage which was celebrated for the violence and uncertainty of its currents—and hence the name was occasionally applied by our older writers to any strait or sea-channel having like characteristics. The use of the word in connexion with tobacco may, like that of "ebolition," have some reference to furious smoking, but the meaning is not clear.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 11:

Apart from cigarette-smoking, however, the use of tobacco grew steadily during the later Victorian period. In "Mr. Punch's Pocket-Book" for 1878 there was a burlesque dialogue between uncle and nephew entitled "Cupid and 'Baccy." The uncle thinks the younger men smoke too much, and declares that tobacco "has destroyed the susceptibility, which in my time made youngsters fall in love, as they often did, with a girl without a penny. No fellow can fall in love when he has continually a pipe in his mouth; and if he ever feels inclined to when it would be imprudent, why he lights his pipe, and very soon smokes the idea of such folly out of his head. Not so when I was of your age. Besides a few old farmers, churchwardens, and overseers, and such, nobody then ever smoked but labourers and the lower orders-cads as you now say. smoking was thought vulgar. Young men never smoked at all. To smoke in the presence of a lady was an inconceivable outrage; yet now I see you and your friends walking alongside of one another's sisters, smoking a short pipe down the street." "The girls like it," says Nepos. "In my time," replies Avunculus, "young ladies would have fainted at the bare suggestion of such an enormity." The dialogue ends as follows:

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