LEXICON OF TOBACCO INDUSTRY JARGON

acceptable rebellion	Expression used by R. J. Reynolds to describe the youth appeal of its Camel brand, identified also as “slightly anti-establishment.” As in “I want to stand out and make a point. Not too much, though.” Allied terms include maverick, rogue, and James Dean.
accommodation	Key element in the 1980S-2000S efforts to thwart smoke-free legislation, following the demonstration of health harms from secondhand smoke. Prominent in the industry’s global Courtesy of Choice campaign, in which the idea was that smokers and non-smokers should be able to live and eat in harmony, with both having a right to enjoy the common air of restaurants and hotels. The professed goal was to avoid “American-style ostracism” of smokers. “Fair accommodation of smokers” was also a key element in the industry’s Operation Down Under and Operation Rainmaker.
alleged	Qualifier required whenever talking about carcinogens or other dangers of smoking. The word appears in more than one hundred thousand documents preserved in the industry’s formerly secret archives now online at http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu. Teague at Reynolds, for example, talked about the need to eliminate “alleged health hazards” from cigarettes; nonburning cigarettes were supposed to reduce “the alleged risks to other people’s health,” etc.
alternate filler	Inert materials used to replace some of the tobacco in cigarettes, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. These typically contained noncombustible materials such as calcium carbonate, silica, glass, or even asbestos. The idea was that cigarettes stuffed with “nonsmoking materials” (NSMs) would reduce tar yields when smoked.
ammonia technology	Technique by which ammonia was added to freebase the nicotine in cigarette smoke (by raising the pH, increasing the alkaloid’s “impact”). Philip Morris’s development of ammonia technology in the early 1960s helped make Marlboro the world’s most popular cigarette. Similar techniques were later developed to freebase street cocaine (“crack”).
annoyance	Term used by the industry to describe the effect of smoking on non-smokers. Secondhand smoke was “annoying”—rather than, say, carcinogenic—with the proper comparison being to a baby crying on an airplane or having to sit next to someone with body odor or strong perfume, etc.
Antis	Industry term for “anti-tobacco activists.” Health advocates are characterized as “anti-smoker” to obscure the fact they are actually pro-public health and, in this sense, “pro-smoker.” Compare screamers.
biological activity	The most common industry euphemism for cancer or precancerous growth. Term is used (for example) to designate the abnormal cellular proliferation produced when tobacco tars are applied to the shaved backs of experimental mice, as in “estimated biological activity” or “EBA.” Sometimes referred to as “Ames activity,” “activity,” or “mouse numbers.” Compare also RAN-1 and RAN-2.
BORSTAL	BAT code word from the late 1950s (used in internal corporate records) for benzpyrene, a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon found in cigarette smoke by Roffo in the 1930s and widely blamed for the carcinogenic powers of cigarette smoke in the 1940s and 1950s. “Borstal” was originally a British term for a home for juvenile delinquents.
brand stretching	Expression used to designate the marketing of tobacco through non-tobacco vehicles such as Marlboro Country Stores or Marlboro Classics (clothing) or Benson & Hedges Bistros. Other terms for this practice include “indirect advertising,” “trademark diversification,” “alibi advertising,” “parallel communications,” “logo licensing,” “image transfer advertising,” and “below the line advertising.” The point in most instances is to circumvent bans on more traditional forms of advertising.
casing	Liquids sprayed onto tobacco sheet in the course of cigarette manufacturing. Casing materials typically include flavorants such as licorice, sugar, and coumarin but also moistening agents such diethylene glycol and oxidants such as potassium citrate. And freebasing agents such as urea or ammonia.
Central File	Also referred to as “Cenfile” or “Tobacco Litigation File.” Central repository of smoking and health documents maintained as index cards in the 1950s and computerized from the 1960s on. Contained 96,558 documents as of 1984.
Committee of Counsel	Also known as the “Policy Committee of Lawyers” or “the Secret Six,” the powerful group of lawyers from the six largest U.S. tobacco firms—American Tobacco, Philip Morris, Lorillard, Brown & Williamson, Liggett & Myers, and R. J. Reynolds—formed in 1958 to control tobacco and health policy.
common knowledge	Industry legal term of art used to claim that everyone has always known about the hazards of tobacco, so people have only themselves to blame for whatever illnesses they contract. Also called “universal awareness.” Contrast open controversy.
compensation	Term designating the fact that when smokers switch to a lower-yield cigarette they will often “compensate” by inhaling more deeply, holding the smoke longer in their lungs, smoking more cigarettes or more puffs per cigarette, smoking farther down on the butt, covering ventilation holes, or otherwise altering their behavior to obtain more nicotine (consciously or unconsciously). Compensation, also known as “titration,” “quota mechanism,” or “accommodation,” is the principal reason lower-yield or “light” cigarettes are no safer than regulars. See also elasticity, lipping behavior, and ventilation.
conversion	R. J. Reynolds term for convincing a target smoker to shift from a competitor’s brand to its own. Thereafter the problem becomes “retention.”
DIET	Acronym for “dry ice expanded tobacco,” a technique developed in the early 1970s involving application of extreme cold to tobacco leaves, causing them to “puff up” or “swell.” Light cigarettes are generally made from expanded tobacco, which is why cigarettes today contain less tobacco than their pre-1960s counterparts. Light cigarettes are “light” in the same way that cotton candy might be considered a low-cal form of candy (falsely, in other words).
D.N.P. (duty not paid)	Tobacco industry euphemism for smuggling, also referred to as “transit trade,” “general trade (GT),” “parallel market,” “second channel,” “border trade,” “re-export” or “back door transactions,” “special” or “opportunistic” markets or customers, “contraband,” “black” or “gray” markets, etc., as in BAT’s description of its 555 International brand: “IED shipments were mainly to Indonesia (as legal imports), and to Hong Kong and Singapore for the Duty Free/Transit trade.” BAT affiliates in the 1990s described D.N.P. as a market “segment.”
document retention policy	Document destruction policy.
elasticity	Notion that cigarettes can be designed to allow smokers to control tar and nicotine yields, according to how they are smoked. Ventilation holes, for example, were placed where they could be covered up by the smoker’s lips or fingers, allowing more smoke to enter the mouth and lungs. Elasticity was deliberately built into cigarettes so that smokers of low-yield brands could obtain higher “satisfaction.” See also compensation, lipping behavior, and ventilation.
ETS	Environmental Tobacco Smoke, a term of art used by the industry to pretty up “secondhand” or “involuntary” smoke, smoke produced by “passive” smoking.
expanded tobacco	Leaf that has been “puffed up,” or expanded, to increase its filling power. Expanded tobacco is less dense, which means a cigarette can be filled with less mass. One of the principal means by which “low tar” and “light” cigarettes are made to deliver less tar on automatic smoking machines and one reason cigarettes weigh significantly less than they used to. See also DIET.
FUBYAS	R. J. Reynolds acronym for “First Usual Brand Young Adult Smokers” or “First Unbranded Young Smokers.” Camel makers used this term when designing strategies for marketing to teenagers, distinguishing (on a scale from conformist to nonconformist) Goody Goodies, Preps, GQs, DISCOs, Rockers, Party Parties, Punkers, and Burnouts.
full flavor	Industry term for “high tar” or “regular” (vs. low-tar or light) cigarettes. There are many acronyms, for example, FFLT (full flavor low tar). Manufacturers typically wanted as much “flavor” with as little tar as possible, but this was not generally possible.
gentlemen’s agreement	Informal agreement reached by leaders of the U.S. tobacco industry in the 1950s not to compete on health effects. Many companies cheated on this agreement, seeking competitive advantages in the realm of “health reassurance.”
grasstops	Friends of influential people (U.S. senators and representatives, for example) whom the tobacco industry would approach to exercise influence. Elaborate computerized records were kept of “grasstops networks”; a senator might have thirty, forty, or even more “grasstops” contacted by “field action teams” for purposes of influencing policy (Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin had 33; Rep. Collin C. Peterson of Minnesota had 42, etc.). Also referred to as “influencers.”
healthy buildings	Construct designed to indicate that buildings can be engineered to be smoker-friendly, by increasing ventilation rather than by limiting smoking. Institutionalized with the establishment of Healthy Buildings International, an industry front to combat efforts to stop indoor smoking. Later spawned comparable terms of art such as “healthy forests” (= extensive logging).
irritation	Catchall term for whatever might be wrong with a cigarette, used to diminish or trivialize dangers. Occupying a flexible middle ground between “taste” and “cancer,” irritation was something the industry could seek to reduce as purely a matter of ensuring satisfaction while simultaneously hoping this would help to reduce carcinogenicity. Irritation was the most common explanation for why a particular chemical or physical act caused cancer (prior to the mutation theory); so the industry could research “irritation” and defend this as an effort to provide customer satisfaction. The conflation had both legal and PR value, since a test of an additive or smoke constituent in, say, a rabbit’s eye could be defended as either a “taste test” (to avoid irritation) or a test to determine pathologic potency. The industry’s solution to “irritation” was to make cigarettes “mild.” Compare annoyance.
learners	One of a number of terms applied to young people just beginning to smoke, along with “starters,” “new smokers,” “pre-smokers,” “initial triers,” etc. Claude Teague at Reynolds distinguished “pre-smokers,” “learning smokers,” and “confirmed smokers” in a 1973 memo complaining about being “unfairly constrained from directly promoting cigarettes to the youth market” and stressing the need for “new brands designed to be particularly attractive to the young smoker.” Compare FUBYAS and restarters.
lipping behavior	Philip Morris term from the 1960s referring to the unconscious covering of ventilation holes by the lips, allowing smokers to obtain more tar and nicotine than predicted from measurements derived from smoking robots. Also known as “lip occlusion” and “lip drape.”
“more research”	Less action; a reason for delay. As in “We need more research.”
mouse carcinogens	Term used by the industry when referring to animal experiments indicating a cancer hazard. So “mouse carcinogens” have been found in tobacco smoke but are not indicative of a human danger. Potencies revealed by animal experiments were sometimes referred to as “mouse numbers.”
niche opportunities	Expression used by Philip Morris in discussions of how to target “African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Gays,” etc.; also referred to as “niche markets” or “audiences.”
nicotine stains	Term invented to replace “tar stains” or “coal tar stains” in the 1930s, when coal tar was found to cause cancer. The new term—used mainly to describe discolorations on smokers’ fingers—was introduced to divert attention from the fact that stains of this sort contained cancer-causing tars. The industry would later dispute the presence even of tars in tobacco smoke. See tar.
open controversy	A main pillar in the doubt-mongering project, the idea here was that no one has ever been able to prove that tobacco is hazardous; the controversy remains “open” and in need of “more research.” Paired with “common knowledge” in the industry’s legal defense strategy.
privileging	Industry technique by which scientific documents or other sensitive papers are produced for discussion with industry lawyers in order to protect them under the guise of attorney-client privilege. Tens of thousands of documents have been protected from subpoena by this process.
prohibition	Always bad. Tobacco’s defenders use this term—along with “abolition” and “abolitionists”—to denigrate any and all efforts to curtail tobacco use. The move is to associate health advocacy with puritanical intolerance, and specifically the unpopular ban on the sale of alcohol in the United States circa 1919–33. The industry’s ridicule of “abolitionists” is curious, given the implied reference to opposing slavery, but the denigration seems to work by calling up a kind of oppositional zealotry or fanaticism, odious by virtue of its antiquarian taint.
RAN-1, RAN-2	R. J. Reynolds abbreviation for “reduced Ames numbers,” referencing the bacterial bioassay developed by Bruce Ames, a Berkeley biochemist, in the mid-1970s. A cigarette with “reduced Ames numbers” was one that generated smoke with a lowered mutagenic potential or “biological activity” (cancer-causing capacity) via use of low-nitrogen blends or washed stems, for example.
reconstituted tobacco	Cigarette ingredient made from tobacco waste by a papermaking process. Recon was used to economize on inputs (by using more of the whole tobacco leaf) but also to fine-tune the chemical composition of cigarette filler (“precision manufacture”). Known inside Philip Morris as “blended leaf” or “BL,” and elsewhere as “R.T.” or “tobacco sheet.” Reynolds referred to it—and the process by which it was made—as “G-7.”
replacement smokers	Industry term for the young smokers needed to “replace” those who die from illnesses caused by tobacco. Expression appears in Reynolds, Lorillard, Philip Morris, and Brown & Williamson documents.
restarters	Brown & Williamson term for people who have quit and then begin smoking again. An important market target, along with “starters” (“learners”) and “switchers” (people who switch from one brand to another or from regulars to lights).
risk factor	Preferred euphemism for cancer-causing agents or activities. The companies have never liked talk of tobacco “causing” cancer but in the 1990s started admitting smoking could be “a risk factor” for various ailments. Similar expressions are used with reference to dangerous persons, as in “it cannot be excluded that [Adlkofer] will become a risk factor for the industry.” Risk can also imply profit, as if smoking were a kind of investment. More honest would be “less lethal” or “less deadly.”
safer cigarette	Used to imply that conventional cigarettes are already “safe.”
satisfaction	Euphemism for nicotine, as in BAT’s claim that “B&H smokers have a preference for slightly higher initial satisfaction.” Satisfaction is to nicotine as taste is to tar. Nicotine is defended as a “taste element,” when it is actually kept in cigarettes to maintain addiction. Also referred to as “impact.”
screamers	Philip Morris term for people who protest receiving cigarette solicitations via direct mail. Millions of such solicitations are sent out annually, and some end up going to people who are underage or have already died from smoking. Philip Morris distinguishes screamers “soft” and “hard”: “soft” screamers are simply people who request being removed from such lists, whereas “hard” screamers (also known as “mass mob screamers”) include direct mail targets who are underage or otherwise troublesome from a legal point of view.
sick building syndrome (SBS)	Concept created by Gray Robertson of Healthy Buildings International—a tobacco industry front—to distract from the hazards of secondhand smoke in indoor spaces. The idea was that buildings suffering from indoor air pollution (from carpet fumes and the like) could be healed by proper ventilation—rather than bans on smoking. SBS becomes a centerpiece of tobacco industry effort to minimize and/or deny the reality of harms caused by breathing indoor smoke.
statistics	Generally suspect, or “mere.” Invectives against statistics appear by the thousands in tobacco industry propaganda. Darrell Huff, author of How to Lie with Statistics (1954), was employed by the industry to present confounding testimony before the U.S. Congress in the 1960s.
tar	The wet, gooey substance that blackens smokers’ lungs. Called “coal tar” for a time in the 1930s, changed to “nicotine stains” or just “tar” (in quotes) when coal tar was found to cause cancer. Clarence C. Little advised against its use (“most undesirable”) given its connotations for “the lay mind.” American Tobacco’s chief of research in 1957 preferred “resins,” adding that “it is quite possible that they are beneficial in a physiological sense, since they may adsorb, enclose and dilute the irritants such as acids and aldehydes. Certainly, from the standpoint of flavor, taste and palatability, they are an essential ingredient of cigarette smoke.” Closely related terms include “smoke solids,” “total particulate matter,” “dry particular matter,” and “condensed phase” smoke constituents. See also nicotine stains.
taste	The principal advertised virtue of smoking but also an industry euphemism for tar (vs. nicotine = “satisfaction”). Compare satisfaction.
transit	Industry code word for smuggling, as in “Opportunities for legal imports need to be fully investigated before we seek transit opportunities.” Smuggling was also known within the industry as “Duty Not Paid”; see D.N.P.
unattractive side effects	Brown & Williamson’s characterization of lung and heart maladies caused by smoking, from 1963.
ventilation	Also referred to as “dilution,” “shunting,” “freshing,” “air suction,” or “smoke bypass.” A technique to lower machine-measured tar and nicotine deliveries by cutting tiny slits in the mouth end of a cigarette. Ventilation slits were strategically placed so that while smoking robots would record lower yields, smokers could cover them to obtain their requisite dosages (“self-titration”). “Ventilation” was also a term used to distract from cigarettes as a cause of indoor air pollution: rooms had not “too much smoke” but rather “too little ventilation.”
virile market	Term for military and/or macho market targets. “Virile females” included female soldiers but also “NASCAR girls.”
weaning	Big Tobacco term for withdrawal from nicotine—smoking cessation—and something to be feared. Tobacco companies worry that if nicotine levels drop significantly below some threshold level, smokers will be “weaned” from the habit.
wordsmithing	Strategic use of language to advance the industry’s legal or PR agenda. Reynolds lawyers in 1985 used “wordsmithing” to characterize their client’s efforts to “to minimize the risk of statements [in internal research reports] that are misleading or incorrect because of poor or imprecise wording.” Chemists at the company were advised “to refrain from discussing potential biological activity and to refer only to ‘alleged’ carcinogens.”
young adults	A euphemism for teenagers, a principal target of many marketing efforts. When cigarette manufacturers are stung by charges of marketing to teens, they can always claim to be targeting “young adults.” Many acronyms: YAS (young adult smokers), FUBYAS, etc. A Brown & Williamson memo from 1975 advised its marketing agents henceforth to use the term “young adult smoker” or “young adult smoking market” rather than “young smokers” or “youth market.” The Ngram for “young adult smokers” indicates a much broader cultural use of this expression after 1975.
ZEPHYR	In classical mythology a mild and propitious early summer breeze; in the late 1950s a BAT code word for cancer. Internal company documents talk about statistical studies demonstrating a causal relationship “between ZEPHYR and tobacco smoking, particularly cigarette smoking.” Compare BORSTAL.