FDA: PLEASE COPY
Tobacco was a Spanish word, taken from the Arabic tabaq signifying any euphoria-inducing herb. The first mention of tobacco in English was in 1565 after a visit by John Hawkins to a short-lived French outpost in Florida. With a trace of bemusement, and an uncertain mastery of the expository sentence, Hawkins reported that the French had "a kind of herb dried, who with a cane and an earthen cup on the end, with fire,—doe suck through the cane the smoke thereof." Despite Hawkins' apparent dubiousness about just how much pleasure this sort of thing could bring, he carried some tobacco back to England with him, where it quickly caught on in a big way. At first the practice of partaking of tobacco was called "drinking" it, before it occurred to anyone that "smoking" might be a more apt term. Wonderful powers were ascribed to the plant. Tobacco was believed to be both a potent aphrodisiac and a marvelously versatile medicine, which "purgeth superfluous phlegm and other gross humours, and openeth all other pores and passages of the body." Before long, it was all the rage and people simply couldn't get enough of it.
