Linguistically, you can pipe up, pipe in, have a set of pipes or something in the pipeline, put it in your pipe and smoke it and, if you get lucky, lay some pipe. It seems strange, but pipe smoking used to be a thing in this country even before we were a country. England’s Tippet men had made clay pipes from the 1660s and their already international business expanded to the North American British Colonies in the 18th Century. Tippet pipes bear a registered trade-mark and fragments or entire pieces have been located at archeological sites from Newfoundland, Canada, to Fort Shirley in Massachusetts, settlement sites in New Jersey, Fort William Henry in New York, as well as Fort Michilimackinac in present day Michigan. More recently, pipe smoking was the mark of a sophisticated and intelligent man - Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell and Mark Twain were practitioners. One of my favorite Manhattan eateries has a great pipe connection, but it’s now a place where you can’t smoke at all.
© 2024 John Oliver
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