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from the How-much-did-folks-at-Stonehenge-smoke? dept.
In a sign that maybe there is hope for the survival of the human race, The Guardian reports that the number of cigarette smokers in the UK has dropped to less than 17%, the lowest number in half a century.
In 1974, over 50% of men in Britain were smokers; that had fallen to just 19.1% in England in 2015. Similarly, just over 40% of women smoked back then; last year it was only 14.9%.
There are now just 7.2 million adults in England who smoke. They are far outnumbered by 14.6 million ex-smokers. It is the first time that under 17% of the population are smokers and is down from the 19.3% seen as recently as 2012.
Interestingly the success rate for people trying to quit has jumped from 13.6% to around 20%.
Some of this may reflect the price of smokes - which look to be between £8 and £10 ($13 US) for a pack of twenty. (Canadian prices are sitting around $9-10 CDN)
And, in the interest of what passes for "balance" these days, there are groups that will dispute the health risks of smoking tobacco.
Disclaimer: Smoked for twenty+ years, mostly plain Camels. Yummmm..... Quit cold turkey.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday September 20 2016, @06:56PM
The point is, etymologically speaking, that you don't burn witches with them. Thus the bundle of sticks meaning for faggot doesn't apply. Instead, the flappy piece of cloth sense applies which has a different etymology. After all, everybody knows that salvaging cigarettes yields cloth [fallout4.wiki], not wood!
The bundle of sticks and homosexual meanings come from the Romance languages (possibly) by way of (vulgar) Latin fascis > Italian faggotto > Old French fagot. First, a bundle of sticks, then we can see it evolve to come to symbolize a heretic and later morph into usage #2, an unpleasant old woman (burn the witch!). At some point, this evolves to refer to a homosexual man as well. The "junior who does certain duties for a senior" meaning and "man hired into military service merely to fill out the ranks at muster" meaning I take as interesting scenery along the way.
The problem is that I'm not readily seeing how Norse flaka > Middle English flakken, which is where they're saying the cigarette meaning of fag came from (originally just the cigarette butt), has anything to do with bundles of sticks.
tl;dr Sticks are made from wood, and you use wood to burn witches. Cigarettes are made from cloth and tobacco, and you can't use them to burn witches. (Well, I suppose you could… or maybe use a lit fag to ignite gasoline-soaked faggots, burning the witch. But you don't burn homosexuals, only witches. Faggots get the noose instead.)
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday September 20 2016, @07:25PM
Cigarettes are made from cloth and tobacco
Should also clarify rolling paper [wikipedia.org]:
Cigarette paper is made from thin and lightweight "rag fibers" (nonwood plant fibers) such as flax, hemp, sisal, rice straw, and esparto.