Vape Gods, Vape Lords, and Fiends: The Language of Vaping

Abstract

Little attention has been devoted to understanding the language surrounding e-cigarette use. Researchers employ terms such as users of e-cigarettes or ENDS, but language employed outside scholarly writing is relatively unexamined. Thus, this study examined the language used by college students to refer to people who use e-cigarettes. College students (N = 1037; Mage= 20.67, SD = 3.81; 72.1% female; 69.6% White) at a southern U.S. university responded to the open-ended question: “What do you call a person who uses e-cigarettes?” Of 1086 responses, e-cigarette users’ (n = 591) and nonusers’ (n = 495) responses were examined separately. Although users and nonusers had the same two top terms (“vaper” and “smoker”), a clearer consensus existed among users where “vaper” was most common (51.3%) followed by “smoker” (21.0%). These same terms were endorsed by 37.0% and 31.5% of nonusers, respectively. The third most popular responses of users related to addiction (e.g., “addict”, “fiend”; 8.46%), whereas nonusers’ responses indicated they did not know what to call an e-cigarette user (e.g., “I don’t know”; 7.1%). Users were equally likely to use positive (e.g., “Vape God”) and negative (e.g., “fool”) terms, whereas nonusers were nearly six times more likely to use negative terms. Therefore, it may be useful to capitalize on these language trends in health campaigns as well as develop separate messaging for users vs. nonusers.