Using grammar to challenge electronic cigarette marketing

Early electronic cigarette marketing.

Seeing the growth of the popularity of electronic cigarettes I wanted to note the importance of tobacco free advocates making a collective effort at getting our language together. ANR has a presentation ice breaker where the audience is asked to say, “smoking ban.”  The presenter then congratulates them for getting that out of the way so that they never have to utter that phrase again.  We work for tobacco free spaces, clean indoor air, and safe smoke free workplaces and public space. We try to avoid saying anything about “anti tobacco” and recognize that “environmental tobacco smoke” is a polite industry way of talking about secondhand smoke. We need to make sure that we do not address the industry challenges from electronic cigarettes with their language. 

It is with this spirit that I suggest that advocates drop, as is conversationally convenient, the use of terms like “vaping” and “E vapor.”  Even the term “E cig” has the short harmless aspect of a nickname.  We might do well to consider the discipline of always using a full description of “electronic cigarettes” as another “nicotine delivery device.”  We can refer to the effluent as just that, “effluent.”  And make note to point out the “fine particulate” included in the “aerosol contamination.” 

The stakes are too high to allow the tobacco industry to define our terms.