As an armchair grammarian, I'm always interested in how our language bends and twists to accommodate new things, and how it never really seems to follow any logical pattern for winding up where it eventually does -- favoring the lowest common denominator.
For historical perspective, and street cred: I started using electronic cigarettes a little over five years ago. I had been trying to quit cigarettes for the ten years previous at least. I loved smoking cigarettes, pipes, cigars, and I used snuff and chewing tobacco as well. At the point I finally picked up some cigarette looking e-cigs in a mall kiosk, I had tried nicotine laced gum, lozenges, drops, and patches as well as two different psychotropic drugs. When I got my first e-cig, I was in fact on my way to buy some cigarettes after caving on yet another three day "quit."
The mall kiosk salesman burdened me with all sorts of misinformation and took somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred dollars for what I would soon discover was about thirty dollars worth of product. The good news was that it sort-of worked. That gave e-cigs an infinite advantage over any of the products or methods previously tried.
However, within a few days, I found myself out of pre-filled cartridges and back on the horns of the same old dilemma. I didn't like the price of the mall kiosk refill kits, so I looked around and found that our local .... hut stocked ejuice. I went by and got a bottle of blueberry flavor liquid at 14 mg nicotine strength and that lasted me about another week. In the meantime, I was surfing the net and discovered the then nascent online e-cigarette community and wound up ordering a push button battery and a twenty pack of refillable "cartomizers."
The naming standards were all over the place at the time and the jargon wars had begun. E-Cig was the strong favorite at the time, and the act of using one was still mostly called "smoking." The term "vaporizing" was not used much, but "vaping" had started to take hold. I hated it at the time because it just sounded childish to my ear. I favored and fought for "steaming" because people are less alarmed by "steam" than they are "vapor." Vapor sounds like chemistry while steam sounds like tea.
In the comfort of my own mind, my personal gear was called a steamer (battery holder or "mod"), carto's, and juice.
On the Gear front, after about a year off combustible tobacco products, I got a "Provari" which was at the time the cadillac of e-cigs. I also got a "cartomizer tank" which is a glass tube that goes around the cartomizer to provide a reservoir for more juice. I had also settled into buying one flavor of juice from one online vendor. I would pretty much stick with that arrangement for the next two years. I purchased two cheap Chinese battery holders and still used the cigarette looking ones from time to time, but mostly, it was Gingerbread in a carto-tank on the Provari all day every day.
Over the past two years, I've started mixing my own juice (about $3.00 vs $15.00 for commercial juice), and using rebuildable coil device heads. I can make atomizer coils using resistance wire and organic cotton for an almost incalculably small expense. I've acquired three or four regulated battery holders with fancy electronics for variable voltage/wattage use, and three or four simple tube battery holders after discovering the joys of high-temp (low ohm) "cloud chasing."
Probably the most amusing development in the electronic vaporizer world is the names of nicotine juices. When I started, it was almost always just what the stuff was supposed to taste like; tobacco, peach, waffles, etc. But now you won't find a straightforward flavor name in the highly commercialized and soon to be over-regulated commercial juice world. All the flavors sound like Stephen King novels and it's not considered worth sniffing unless there is a demon or zombie on the label. I'm thinking about producing a wheat-grass flavor with a picture of an angry old man called "Stay Off My Lawn."
I like to keep it simple so I still call all my "mods" steamers and the fuel is just "juice," but I have to face facts when necessary; the jargon wars are over. "Vape" was just entered into Webster's and when I asked my 13 year old if she had seen my "steamer," she asked, "You mean your vape?" So not only is the verb for what I'm doing "vape" but the general noun for what I'm doing it with is "vape" as well. As a matter of fact, I've seen several instances where juice is also called just "vape." Maybe I'm the one that is overcomplicating things.
I can now just grab my vape, put some vape in it and vape vape vapie vape vape all the vape long day. Yay vape.
SF
For historical perspective, and street cred: I started using electronic cigarettes a little over five years ago. I had been trying to quit cigarettes for the ten years previous at least. I loved smoking cigarettes, pipes, cigars, and I used snuff and chewing tobacco as well. At the point I finally picked up some cigarette looking e-cigs in a mall kiosk, I had tried nicotine laced gum, lozenges, drops, and patches as well as two different psychotropic drugs. When I got my first e-cig, I was in fact on my way to buy some cigarettes after caving on yet another three day "quit."
The mall kiosk salesman burdened me with all sorts of misinformation and took somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred dollars for what I would soon discover was about thirty dollars worth of product. The good news was that it sort-of worked. That gave e-cigs an infinite advantage over any of the products or methods previously tried.
However, within a few days, I found myself out of pre-filled cartridges and back on the horns of the same old dilemma. I didn't like the price of the mall kiosk refill kits, so I looked around and found that our local .... hut stocked ejuice. I went by and got a bottle of blueberry flavor liquid at 14 mg nicotine strength and that lasted me about another week. In the meantime, I was surfing the net and discovered the then nascent online e-cigarette community and wound up ordering a push button battery and a twenty pack of refillable "cartomizers."
The naming standards were all over the place at the time and the jargon wars had begun. E-Cig was the strong favorite at the time, and the act of using one was still mostly called "smoking." The term "vaporizing" was not used much, but "vaping" had started to take hold. I hated it at the time because it just sounded childish to my ear. I favored and fought for "steaming" because people are less alarmed by "steam" than they are "vapor." Vapor sounds like chemistry while steam sounds like tea.
In the comfort of my own mind, my personal gear was called a steamer (battery holder or "mod"), carto's, and juice.
On the Gear front, after about a year off combustible tobacco products, I got a "Provari" which was at the time the cadillac of e-cigs. I also got a "cartomizer tank" which is a glass tube that goes around the cartomizer to provide a reservoir for more juice. I had also settled into buying one flavor of juice from one online vendor. I would pretty much stick with that arrangement for the next two years. I purchased two cheap Chinese battery holders and still used the cigarette looking ones from time to time, but mostly, it was Gingerbread in a carto-tank on the Provari all day every day.
Over the past two years, I've started mixing my own juice (about $3.00 vs $15.00 for commercial juice), and using rebuildable coil device heads. I can make atomizer coils using resistance wire and organic cotton for an almost incalculably small expense. I've acquired three or four regulated battery holders with fancy electronics for variable voltage/wattage use, and three or four simple tube battery holders after discovering the joys of high-temp (low ohm) "cloud chasing."
Probably the most amusing development in the electronic vaporizer world is the names of nicotine juices. When I started, it was almost always just what the stuff was supposed to taste like; tobacco, peach, waffles, etc. But now you won't find a straightforward flavor name in the highly commercialized and soon to be over-regulated commercial juice world. All the flavors sound like Stephen King novels and it's not considered worth sniffing unless there is a demon or zombie on the label. I'm thinking about producing a wheat-grass flavor with a picture of an angry old man called "Stay Off My Lawn."
I like to keep it simple so I still call all my "mods" steamers and the fuel is just "juice," but I have to face facts when necessary; the jargon wars are over. "Vape" was just entered into Webster's and when I asked my 13 year old if she had seen my "steamer," she asked, "You mean your vape?" So not only is the verb for what I'm doing "vape" but the general noun for what I'm doing it with is "vape" as well. As a matter of fact, I've seen several instances where juice is also called just "vape." Maybe I'm the one that is overcomplicating things.
I can now just grab my vape, put some vape in it and vape vape vapie vape vape all the vape long day. Yay vape.
SF
