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# Weekend Words: Smoke
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-smoke/
- Published: 2014-01-05T13:30:05.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:34:03.000Z
- Description: On New Year's Day, pot went legal in Colorado.
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:03 (2014, 2015, part 1)

![smoke](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/01/smoke.jpg)

David Teniers the Younger, “Smokers in an Interior” (c. 1637), oil on panel, 39 x 37 cm, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (image via Web Gallery of Art)

On New Year’s Day, pot went legal in Colorado.

As chronicled by the[*New York Times*](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/us/colorado-stores-throw-open-their-doors-to-pot-buyers.html?%5Fr=0&ref=hyperallergic.com):

> To supporters, it was a watershed moment in the country’s tangled relationship with the drug. They said it was akin to the end of Prohibition, albeit with joints being passed instead of Champagne being uncorked.  
>  
> To skeptics, it represented a grand folly that they predicted would tarnish the image of a state whose official song is John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” and lead to higher teenage drug use and more impaired driving.

As chronicled by [Tin Pan Alley](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin%5FPan%5FAlley?ref=hyperallergic.com):

> “Now laughing friends deride  
> Tears I cannot hide  
> So I smile and say  
> When a lovely flame dies,  
> Smoke gets in your eyes.”  
>  
> **—Otto Harbach, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”**

> “The winter evening settles down  
> With smell of steaks in passageways.  
> Six o’clock.  
> The burnt-out ends of smoky days.”  
>  
> **—T. S. Eliot, *The Waste Land***

> “Courage is fire, and bullying is smoke.”  
>  
> **—Benjamin Disraeli**

> “And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day or night, who worship the beast and his image.”  
>  
> ***—Revelation*, 14:11**

> “The smoke and wealth and din of Rome.”  
>  
> **—Horace, *Odes***

> “Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.”  
>  
> **—George Eliot, *Daniel Deronda***

> “Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.”  
>  
> **—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.**

> “Herein is not only a great vanity, but a great contempt of God’s good gifts, that the sweetness of man’s breath, being a good gift of God, should be wilfully corrupted by this stinking smoke.”  
>  
> **—King James I, *A Counterblast to Tobacco***

> “One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.”  
>  
> **—Vincent Van Gogh**