Vape is this year’s selfie

What the 2014 word of the year says about our times.

LINDSAY Lohan, Katy Perry, Barry Manilow and Ronnie Wood all do it, and now it’s Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year. Vape: to suck on an electronic cigarette. If you vape, you are a “vaper” (for obvious reasons, no one thought “vapist” was a good idea); and the act of doing so – perhaps in a “vaporium” – is “vaping”. (In fact, “vaping” was coined as long ago as 1983, when such devices were as yet a pipe-dream.)