Herfing

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant and Martha. This is Blake in Indianapolis, Indiana. How are you today?

Hi, Blake. How are you doing? Nice to talk to you.

I’m well. Hey, I’m calling today because I’ve got a question about a weird word I’ve come across recently.

Okay.

And I’ll give you a little context. Recently, I took up cigar smoking kind of as a very casual hobby on special occasions and vacations and those kinds of things.

Okay.

My wife likes to say that I have an obsessive personality, but I like to just say that I have an insatiable thirst for knowledge.

So even though I don’t smoke a lot of cigars, I’ve done a lot of research and kind of try to get an idea about the culture and how they’re made and kind of what goes into the whole process.

And so in my reading about that, I keep coming across a word, and the word is herf.

It’s spelled H-E-R-F, and I’ve seen it in a couple different contexts.

Primarily, I see it used as a noun to describe like a meeting where people would get together and smoke cigars and enjoy them together.

But I also see it used as a verb to describe the act of smoking a cigar.

So, for instance, if you are at a hearf, you could ask another friend there what they were hearfing on, for example.

And so I wondered if you could share any insight as to maybe where that term came from.

It sounds like what I did the first time I tried a cigar.

Oh, yeah.

That’s funny because when I think about that word, it brings to mind the act that your mouth makes when you use the muscles to pull the smoke into your mouth.

Because you’re not inhaling the smoke.

You’re kind of pulling it through the cigar like a straw.

If you kind of picture the motion that your lips and cheeks would make, it kind of reminds me of the noise that you say when you say hearf.

Kind of that kind of motion.

That’s always come to mind when I think the word.

But I wonder if that might have anything to do with the true origins of the word.

I think you’re on to something.

Your thoughts are in line with what has been covered by Barry Popik, P-O-P-I-K.

Barry Popik is a researcher who has a great little website at BarryPopik.com where he looks into word origins, and basically anything that he finds, he digs around.

And for this particular term, HERF, H-E-R-F, he found an old posting from 1996 in the Usenet discussion forums.

You can still, I believe, find it on Google.

And this person who goes by the name of Prince of Sceves described herfing a cigar and didn’t really even explain it.

But later when people said, well, what do you mean by herfing? He says, oh, well, I first heard this term in 1982 from a blue blood person to somebody kind of well-to-do who used it to refer to the way your face contorts when you try to inhale on a hand-rolled cigar or cigarette.

Because if you pack it too tightly, you’re like, whoo, just like Martha did.

So your face makes these weird kind of derpy, herpy, you know, expressions.

Oh, I was coughing it out.

Oh, you were coughing it up.

And so this is the first use that we know in print from 1996.

We kind of have to take this person’s word for the stuff that they’re telling us about 1982.

But we, you know, we’re just going to assume that their motives are pure.

And this term came out of Texas in 1982, traveled to this online discussion forum in the mid-90s where people were talking about cigars.

And then not a year or two later, this group of cigar smokers in the Usenet discussion group, I believe it’s alt.cigars, had a get-together in Texas to get-together to smoke cigars.

And they called it a herf.

They all came together to herf at this herf.

Wow.

Yeah.

That’s so interesting how that word has evolved from kind of, like you said, the motion that your face makes to then describe a social gathering.

That’s such a cool etymology.

It’s a natural thing.

We noun verbs all the time and verb nouns and words go back and forth across different parts of speech.

So it’s not altogether that unusual.

But like I said, we have to take this person’s word for it.

There were two other theories I think might be worth sharing.

One is that there was a term during the Vietnam War which meant to pack a lot of gear.

If you were in the military, you would hearf a lot of gear, kind of like humping it, and you might be under strain.

You’ve got 80 to 150 pounds of gear on your back or whatever, and you’re like really showing the strain.

Also, we have to acknowledge that there’s the word huff, which means to inhale.

And so it’s possible that hearf is influenced by huff.

You might huff a chemical if you want to get high illicitly.

You might huff, you could even just huff a cigar smoke or marijuana smoke for that matter.

But this is completely common in the cigar smoking world, it sounds like.

Yeah, in the United States.

Outside the United States, it’s virtually unheard of.

Okay.

Oh, wow, okay.

I’d never heard of it.

So there you go, Blake.

That’s the history.

If you want to find out more about this research that we’re talking about, go to barrypopic.com.

That’s P-O-P-I-K.

And you can just look for H-E-R-F on his site, and you’ll uncover all the details that he’s managed to uncover.

Excellent.

Well, thank you so much for your time, Grant and Martha.

It was a pleasure to be on your show.

Yeah, thanks for calling.

Really appreciate it.

Take care.

Great to talk with you.

Bye-bye.

You too.

Bye now.

Grant, I didn’t want to leave anybody with the impression that I actually smoke cigars.

Everybody tries stuff like that once, right?

Yeah.

But I don’t.

I’m actually a misocapnist.

Misocapnist?

Yes.

So miso, the root probably means against or…

Like misogyny.

Misogyny, right.

And the capnos, I don’t know what that is.

Capnos in Greek is smoke.

So a misocapnist, M-I-S-O-C-A-P-N-I-S-T, is somebody who doesn’t like smoke.

Oh, you dislike smoke.

Very good.

All right.

Learned a new word, misocapnist.

Yes.

Well, whether you’re a cigar smoker or misocapnist, give us a call, 877-929-9673,

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.