You're probably thinking, what a pretentious title for a tobacco article. It's what I'd be thinking. To be honest, it took me a while to find the term "semantic discord," but it was necessary for an economy of words. The concept takes too long to write out and titles require brevity. I found it by Googling various iterations of, "What is that thing when people have different definitions in their heads for the same stuff and have trouble communicating because of it?"

Eventually, I found a site that more elegantly refined the idea: "Semantic discord is the situation where two parties disagree on the definition of a word or several words essential to communicating or formulating any concept at issue."

In the world of pipes, many of us disagree about the meanings of words like Aromatic, English, or Scottish as they pertain to tobacco blends. But we may not even know we are experiencing a semantic dispute. We often assume that others have adopted the same definitions as ourselves. What I understand as the meaning of an Aromatic blend might not be the same as your understanding. I might think a particular tobacco is a Balkan while you understand it to be an English blend. Blend classifications don't have well-defined parameters and tobacco companies, in trying to be different from others and retain their individualistic flavor profiles, don't always reveal all of the components in a blend, making them harder to classify. The definitions that we seem to understand are so broad as to render them ineffectual.

Scottish blends are a good example. "I've heard them described as English/Aromatic," says C&D Head Blender Jeremy Reeves. "I have heard English with Perique, I've heard English with Black Cavendish, I've heard English with Scotch whisky sprayed on it — and all of these with some prevalence. Spirits, by the way, are not just flavorings; they leave very little flavor behind. The alcohol permeates the leaf very deeply because alcohol molecules are so small; the alcohol actually binds with the tobacco oils; the flavor it does impart provides an impression that it's coming from the leaf itself rather than from something on the leaf. But my first introduction to a Scottish mixture was described to me as an English blend that had Perique in it. Then I started realizing that some people used the term Scottish to refer to English blends that had Black Cavendish in them. I've even heard people call My Mixture 965 a Scottish blend. I think what's interesting is that our whole hobby is so niche that it seems to be a secret even to those who know about it."

Something like Midnight Drive may be classified by some as a Scottish blend because of the presence of both Latakia and Perique. But if I think it's a Scottish mixture and discuss it as such with someone who thinks Scottish mixtures mean a Latakia blend with an Aromatic topping, we're talking different languages. Then the fellow standing next to us who thinks Scottish mixtures include Black Cavendish will think we're both mistaken, and his friend who thinks it must have Scotch whisky to be Scottish might assume that Midnight Drive has whisky on it. "A Scottish mixture to one person or another might mean any of several different things," says Jeremy. There just isn't a firm definition for these connotations.

English Blends

Trying to categorize tobacco blends doesn't hold up very well. The best we often do is look at a list of components and make assumptions. "Even something like an English blend," says Jeremy, "can mean many different things. If you use the term English to mean a blend that contains Latakia, is a blend like Lombard an English blend? It's far and away predominantly Virginia with a whisper of Latakia and Dark Fired. To me, Lombard does not evoke the same sort of flavor profile that, say, Star of the East Flake does, which is 50% Latakia, with Virginia and Oriental making up the other half — and Virginia by far the majority of that other half."

We often assume that others have adopted the same definitions as ourselves

The term "English blend" can mean many different things to different people. "It may refer to one of the English blending houses like Germain or Gawith. It can refer to English as an unflavored tobacco, commonly, but not always, containing Latakia. Or it can mean a tobacco that is made according to the English flavoring laws that do allow flavoring to be added as long as those flavorings are naturally derived. So it is true to call Star of the East Flake, which is made in the United States in South Carolina by Cornell & Diehl, an English. And it is equally true to call Ennerdale Flake an English tobacco in spite of the fact that it contains no Latakia and is very heavily perfumed. And it can be true to call Opening Night made by C&D an English tobacco in the sense that it's not flavored at all. So yeah, I think that all of our categories and classifications mean a lot of disparate things, and what they actually mean depends on who you talk to or what time period you're referencing."

Even if we consider these classifications in terms of ingredients, the proportions of those ingredients are important as well. "The relationship between these different flavor profiles is important, and the different tobaccos used and how the blend is crafted to focus on one or another. I'm comfortable saying that I like jazz and I'm comfortable saying that I like blues, but further sub-categorization gets less fun. There are so many things you can do with music, so many variations and combinations. It just becomes less cool to me to dial down further and further into subgenres. And I sometimes think that maybe pipe tobacco attempts to do the same thing. The possibilities of flavor profiles that you can accomplish with all these different kinds of tobaccos don't necessarily fall well into a category if you're using the full spectrum of what is available. More often than not, you're going to be making something that technically could be categorized as this, but then a whole bunch of caveat statements after that can push it into a different interpretation."

Black Cavendish

"Black Cavendish as a style of tobacco suffers from this, too. Some people think that anything containing Black Cavendish is automatically Aromatic, even though Black Cavendish on its own is only steamed and pressed leaves. But the base leaf used to produce Black Cavendish can be any kind of tobacco, and the way that you apply steam and pressure to accomplish the Black Cavendish process can be done by several different methods. So there is no cohesive rule about what Black Cavendish even is. It has by some method been turned black, but what the tobacco is before it is blackened can be anything from Bright Virginia to Red Virginia to White or Dark Burley with enough sugar applied to them that the Maillard process can still happen to turn it black, to Oriental tobacco, or cigar tobacco. You can cavendish any kind of tobacco that you want to as long as it has enough sugar. So Cavendish is another thing that just resists categorization. There are no written rules about which tobaccos require particular standards. There are no rules about anything."

The best we often do is look at a list of components and make assumptions.

Aromatics

Besides those ambiguities, our tobaccos may evade our own personal definitions because their complete ingredients are seldom revealed. Some pipe smokers avoid Aromatics, or think they do, preferring pure tobacco without toppings or flavorings. I was in that category for many years before discovering that almost everything, even tobaccos listed as straight Virginias or Va/Pers, almost always includes some subtle modifications, if only to modulate the pH for better mouthfeel without flavor impact. The vast majority of tobacco blends contain some sort of addition.

I've been smoking a lot of Peter Stokkebye Luxury Navy Flake lately, for example. It's a Virginia/Perique, but it has something else as well, something not included in its simple list of ingredients. It's subtle, but there's an Aromatic character and I think it probably has some vanilla flavoring, but I can't be sure. Besides that, the flakes are so fine and delicate that I think they must include some sort of binder, probably gum arabic, or they'd fall apart. I used to consider myself something of a purist, but I like Luxury Navy Flake and I'm not going to stop smoking it just because I've decided to recategorize it in my personal lexicon as an Aromatic.

For a long time in the '90s, Aurora was my favorite tobacco. It was made by McClelland for Bob Hamlin's Pipe Collectors Club of America and later became a regular McClelland tobacco. As a self-proclaimed purist, gravitating only to straight Virginias with no casings or toppings, I was irritated when Bob referred to Aurora as an Aromatic. It wasn't identified as an Aromatic on the tin in so many words; it simply listed straight Virginias: "The full spectrum of Matured Virginia flavor is presented here in this rich, naturally sweet blend of mellow red Virginias and rich, deeply aromatic black stoved lemon Virginias." I've never detected a flavoring in the tobacco, but Bob helped in its development and knew more than I did. Did he mean Aromatic in the sense that pure Red Virginias are aromatic? I didn't interpret it so, but maybe we were talking about two different things. I can't ask him now because he passed away in 2019, but maybe my idea of Aromatic and his were dissimilar.

The possibilities of flavor profiles that you can accomplish with all these different kinds of tobaccos don't necessarily fall well into a category

Talking with Jeremy over the years has revealed some of my misconceptions. I told him long ago, for example, that I didn't like Aromatics, that I avoided all casings, flavorings, and propylene glycol, which is a ubiquitous, food-grade humectant that does not alter flavor. I thought I avoided Aromatics back then, but I was thinking of heavily flavored, dessert-topping palate explosions. There were subtleties in the blender's art that I did not understand.

Jeremy asked what I was smoking, and he was gentle in revealing that my thinking was inaccurate. My tobacco did indeed include PG, gum arabic as a binding agent, added sugar, and flavoring. It's a fantastic tobacco, just not what I thought it was at the time.

The despicable Jeremy, who I thought was my friend, then proceeded to shatter my perceptions about other tobaccos in my rotation by revealing that they contained similar additives and a variety of subtle flavorings. I hadn't recognized those components. I thought I was smoking unadulterated tobacco. But their characters were so different from each other that I soon recognized my mistake.

I used to consider myself something of a purist

My existential crisis was due only to my own misclassification of the blends I smoked, not because I enjoyed them any less. Jeremy suggested that I try Opening Night by C&D as an experiment. "We do add water and small mineral components," he said, "but the end result is truly just the taste of pure tobacco as it came from the curing barn."

Strangely, I didn't much care for Opening Night. I was missing my additives.

"When someone says they don't like Aromatics," says Jeremy, "they can mean a number of things. They may mean they don't like something like Autumn Evening, which is a popular maple-flavored Aromatic. Or, they may mean that they don't believe they smoke anything that is not tobacco, and in most cases that just can't be true. There are very few tobacco products that are completely void of any sort of added flavoring or casing. There's a whole breadth of possibilities with tobacco that resists a strong categorization system because you can use half a percent of something or five percent of something; you can add tiny little dribs and drabs of things that may be indiscernible to the end user. I am not aware of an Aromatic that has no casing or topping, but I'm definitely aware of products that have a casing or topping and are regarded as non-Aromatics."

I thought I avoided Aromatics back then,

Tobacco Processing

Part of the difficulty behind categorizing tobacco types is low visibility for the process of tobacco production, but it goes even beyond flavorings to the physical characteristics of tobacco. "People occasionally object to what they think is a small stem in their tobacco." We all find those; they're little woody slivers. "When they send an image, it isn't of a stem; it's a vein from the tobacco leaf. There's no way to remove all of the veins from the lamina of the leaf, but a tobacco stem is as big around as a forefinger or larger. Every tobacco grown in North America has rather large stems, and branching off of those are fairly sizable veins at the base. They get very fine out at the end, but there is no mechanical way to do much more than remove that middle rib and when the veins dry, they still have some structure. Some people think they're stems. Most people just don't have a lot of exposure to tobacco as a crop."

Before we crack open a tin of finished tobacco, the manufacturer employs considerable processing that we know little about because they strive to provide unique products and don't want their competitors to figure out how they achieve their distinctive style.

There are very few tobacco products that are completely void of any sort of added flavoring or casing

Balkans

"I've heard Balkan used as a term to refer to Latakia blends that were very heavy in Latakia," says Jeremy. "And then I think the more traditional term Balkan actually refers to the opposite, an English blend or a Latakia blend that focuses primarily on tobacco from the Balkan regions, with the Turkish and Oriental tobaccos in the blend as the prominent note, Latakia taking a subordinate role, and the Virginias playing a much more supportive role."

The problem originates with English blends in a historical sense. "The way that I've understood English blends," says Jeremy, "is that when we refer to Latakia blends as English, it's because, during periods of British occupation in the Mid-East, Latakia was easier to come by. The Virginias in the blend were coming from farther away and had to be imported from the Americas or Africa. So the Latakia was readily available, but the Virginias were less so, and these blends were structured according to convenience and what was the new and posh flavor of interest, Latakia being that tobacco.

Manufacturers remain somewhat secretive

"Balkan mixtures were sort of the same idea, but you had the equal and ready availability of Turkish tobaccos that hadn't gone through a long fire-cured process. Some people were really fond of Latakia and wanted it to be a big, bold, major flavor in a blend, thus English. Other people wanted it to take more of a supporting role so the blend could focus more on the nutty and floral aspects of the Oriental tobaccos that had not gone through that fire-curing process that Latakia does, and those were Balkans." Perhaps the distinction wasn't enough, because we still confuse the different categories. Interestingly, leaf dealers and those involved in tobacco as an industrial product consider the term Aromatic to mean Oriental tobacco, so in some contexts, Balkans are also Aromatics.

None of this discussion makes our tobaccos any less attractive. They still taste the way they do, and that's what makes us like them. Their classification is merely a way to communicate their general attributes. When we say, "This is an English blend," we're communicating the type of tobacco in a general way, not specific. But until we can build a more precise vocabulary, we should recognize that when we tell a friend we're smoking an Aromatic, they may have a completely different idea of what we are trying to convey.

classification is merely a way to communicate their general attributes.

I forgave Jeremy all those years ago, by the way, for shattering my perceptions about what sort of smoker I was and what categories of tobaccos I liked. I learned that I liked mixtures beyond my self-imposed restrictions. I learned to be more open about trying things I wouldn't have, and it has expanded my appreciation for the myriad possibilities in pipe tobacco. It's strange that I allowed rhetorical constructs of definition to limit my experiences, but now that the parameters have drifted for me, I seem to be enjoying myself more.

Bibliography

• "Is there a word that describes when two or more people have different understandings of the same word?" English Language and Usage, 2014.