Y’all wouldn’t happen to be the sort of folks who started coughing when they saw a cigarette pack come out—before the cigarette was even lit, would you? I observed that countless times when I smoker. An unlit cigarette would provoke the same hacking a lit one would. We used to pull one out just for fun, to see how many people had that Pavlovian reaction.
Actually they are reacting to you, not the unlit cigarette. Smokers don’t realize just how much they stink and how much they stink up everything else around them.
There was a cartoon in The New Yorker some years ago.
Couple in a restaurant complaining to waiter-—”Waiter,the people at the next table are talking about smoking. Please ask them to stop.”
That kind of says it all.
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