Nancy Matos

Reader Question: “Dally searched his pocket for a cigarette, and finding none, said, ‘You gotta cancer stick, Johnny-cake?’”

Could you explain “cancer stick”?

My comments: “Butt.” “Cig.” “Fag.” “Smoke.” These, along with “cancer stick” are other ways to refer to a cigarette. “Cig” may be the more obvious one, which is short for “cigarette”, and “smoke” makes sense too, as a cigarette produces smoke when lit and describes the verb “to smoke” a cigarette. “Butt” can be a slang term for referring to someone’s rear end, but is also what we call the end piece of cigarette which is snuffed out in an ashtray or discarded on the street. To many ears outside of the United Kingdom, Australia or New Zealand, calling a cigarette a “fag” is quite strange and is usually greeted with raised eyebrows and strange looks, as it is also a derogatory term for a male homosexual.

Cancer stick refers to the dangers of smoking and the high risks of getting cancer for cigarette smokers. Other darker terms for cigarettes are "lung darts" (as cigarettes are similarly shaped to darts and smoking affects the lungs primarily) and “sweet gaspers", alluding to the lack of breath and poor breathing a smoker can have.

The example above comes from the classic American teen novel, “The Outsiders” by S.E. Hinton, which featured a lot of cigarette smoking by the story’s main characters, who were troubled youths involved in street gangs in 1960s America. You wouldn’t hear someone ask for a cancer stick that often nowadays, but it was a popular slang term back then.

本文仅代表作者本人观点，与本网立场无关。欢迎大家讨论学术问题，尊重他人，禁止人身攻击和发布一切违反国家现行法律法规的内容。

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Nancy Matos is a foreign expert at China Daily Website. Born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, Nancy is a graduate of the Broadcast Journalism and Media program at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Her journalism career in broadcast and print has taken her around the world from New York to Portugal and now Beijing. Nancy is happy to make the move to China and join the China Daily team.