We Need A Good Smoking Word
To conflate today’s major themes of smoking and language, let me put something to you: Why is there no good single word that conveys the need to smoke? When one has hunger one is hungry; when one thirsts one is thirsty. What is one when he desperately needs to run out of the bar and have a cigarette RIGHT NOW?
“Smoky” obviously does not work, what with all its other connotations. I have long considered “nicky,” evoking as it does nicotine, as a possible solution, but I am troubled by that errant “k” in there (I will not abide deviation from the root) and rendering it as “nicy” is problematic for when it is printed. (I once had an argument with a colleague over the correction orthography for “vag” — a reference to the female pudendum — which she insisted on spelling as “vadge” because it read more clearly; I took her point, but it still rankles, as I’m something of a traditionalist in these matters.) “Nickfitty” is a distasteful, bastardized conjunction that I refuse to even examine. “Ciggy” sounds too much like something an upper class drunk in a high society comedy of the Thirties would use to describe the actual smokable material, while “butty” just makes you think of someone who’s all ass.
The conundrum may be moot; how much longer will we even be able to smoke? But I think we should at least do our best to find the proper descriptor while we still can, so that future generations — if there are any — can look back at the world in which we lived and sigh longingly for our glamor and drug dependency. We owe them that, at least. So here we are: a single word, with a -y ending, that expresses the frenzied need for a cigarette. Any ideas?