NICK 0’ TEEN

Greymouth Evening Star, 2 March 1931, Page 2

NICK 0’ TEEN

A WREATH FOR MY LADY. As if they did not have dozens of authentic and well-established fetes to celebrate, the French have lately been paying homage to “the great god Nick o’ Teen.” To make tobacco masculine strikes Englishmen and Americans as an incongruity. Tobacco is thoroughly feminine to an AngloSaxon. “My Lady Nicotine” has been praised by many admirers of ladies and. of good tobacco, and a misogynist is willing to forego the society of all women if he can have the consolations of that charmer. It is curious, too, to see the word nicotine turned out of its rightful home. It is derived from the name of the French Ambassador at Madrid in the sixteenth century, Jean Nicot. He introduced the tobacco plant into France. In turning the word into English, or rather into Irish, the French are pursuing the current fashion for adopting foreign phrases. Just as the mail-order catalogues of the big magasins advertise articles for “baby” and clothes for “ladies,” the celebrators like to Anglicjze the name of the tobacco deity. Cowper’s lines on the “pernicious weed” are now out of date, because men complain as much as women of the constant smoking of cigarettes by young moderns. “The sex whose presence civilize ours” is no longer banished when pipes and cigars appear. But it is still the same soothing cure for care and will continue, no matter what the French or any one may call it.