What's in a name?

Electronic cigarette.

I have never used one.

Not even that very first BlowOne.

Do these look like cigarettes?

I smoked a cigarette on the way to the store to buy the BlowOne. I even smoked a cigarette on the way back from the store. I got home, filled the tank, turned on the battery and… the BlowOne is not a cigarette. It isn't a good replacement or alternative for a cigarette. It doesn't look like a cigarette, doesn't taste like a cigarette, and it certainly doesn't satisfy the craving for a cigarette…

So why the name ‘electronic cigarette’?

I quit smoking with a Beyond Vape Spire, a Kanger pro tank 3, and an assortment of e-liquids... a setup that was, well, most definitely not an electronic 'cigarette'. In fact none of the hardware that I have since collected bear any resemblance to cigarettes. Nor do any of the e-liquids that I use.

So why the name ‘electronic cigarette’?

To be fair, there are some devices that the label seems to fit… mostly the offerings of companies like Altrias, Lorillard, Njoy, and RJ Reynolds. Products that are designed to be artificial cigarettes. Products that many of us refer to as cig-a-likes. ...But I’m not thinking about cig-a-likes today, I’m thinking about everything else, everything that isn't a cig-a-like.

And I’m thinking that calling everything else electronic cigarettes is bad. It’s bad for the community, it’s bad for the industry and its bad for public perception.

Over the years the anti smoking brigade has convinced 80% of the population that smoking is bad. That a cigarette ember is actually a tiny rift exposing the very fires of hell and that cigarette smoke is a vile miasma issued from the burning souls of the damned… and… I may just be overstating things a little bit, but the point remains that the more vaping is equated to cigarettes in the mind of the public, the more of an uphill battle we face in our efforts to oppose anti-vaping legislation. We can’t change the legal definitions, but we can challenge the language that we, ourselves, use. We can, hopefully, realize a shift in the terms that the general public associates with vaping, and separate vaping, if ever so slightly, from all the negativity associated with the word ‘cigarette’.