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Jsf8957 t1_itt4l0w wrote

I looked into it more and while tobacco enemas were indeed very real, they are unlikely to be the origin of the phrase “blowing smoke up someone’s ass”. The enemas were used in the 18th and early 19th centuries but fell out of vogue when in 1811 it was proven that tobacco was toxic to the heart. The phrase “blowing smoke up somebody’s ass” seems to have been coined sometime around the 1960s with the first appearance in a published work in 1965. By then nobody was using tobacco enemas anymore and there’s no evidence that they played any role in alternative medicine movements around that time.

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Comprehensive-Ad4815 t1_itusqg8 wrote

Sure it fell out of style because it wasn't working. Thus the term. Not many other reasons to blow smoke up someone's ass

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Jsf8957 t1_itvsv20 wrote

Point is there is no (proven) link between the practice of enemas and this phrase. The phrase popped up in the 1960s with no apparent references to the old “medical” practice. People connected the dots and claimed that it was the origin of the phrase, but there’s no evidence for it beyond the fact that it seems to fit. It’s probably an example of false etymology.

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paulyweird t1_itwrla4 wrote

The question remains and maybe you can research, how old was the author in 1960?

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