Post-9/11, we’ve heard a lot of new jargon pertaining to travel and security. An example is vaporwake, that term for the airborne trail we leave of our natural scent, perfumes, and the odor of any drugs or weapons we may be carrying. Another example of Transportation Safety Administration terminology: puffer machine, the device that’s used to read your vaporwake by blowing a puff of air on you. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Travel Jargon”
I’ve been working on collecting words related to travel,
And I’m particularly interested in words related to security after 9-11.
Yeah.
And some of the language is really kind of dispiriting, of course.
There’s things like puffers.
Those are the machines they used for a while that you would stand there with your arms up
And a puff of air would blow on you and then machines would quickly read the air to find out
If you had drugs or weapons or bombs on you.
Yeah.
Do you hear about those?
No.
But the word that I liked a little better than that, and it’s related, was vapor wake.
Apparently, we all leave a vapor wake wherever we go.
So it’s your natural odor.
It’s the chemicals you’ve applied, perfume or deodorant.
But it’s also if you made coffee that morning or if you’re carrying explosives
Or have recently handled guns or fireworks,
In your vapor wake, there might be traces of this,
And machines and some of the dogs that can sniff this stuff out might get onto you.
In your vapor wake.
Your vapor wake.
I’m picturing very small beings water skiing.
Yeah, but if you could visualize the air around you,
You would see that it does very much behave like a wake.
Yeah.
Like a wake behind a speedboat.
Another thing to worry about.
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