Q. Recently I received an invitation to attend a cigar "herf". On looking through my dictionaries I found no entries for the term "herf". Do you have any information regarding this apparently new slang word?
A. This is a curious term, with an odd genesis.
It has now been firmly established, in part by the work of Barry Popik (see http://wwwords.org?HERF), that the term first appeared online:
I tried several when I first began smoking cigars and found them all to be very bland and almost impossible to herf, they were so tightly wrapped.
[A posting by somebody known only by his nickname Prince of Skeeves to the newsgroup alt.smokers.cigars, 21 Nov. 1996.]
A few months later the writer explained to the same newsgroup that he first heard the term at a "junior college in Clyde, Texas, in 1982 from a blueblood derelict friend of my named Stu" and that it referred to "the ungainly and humorous facial contortion required to deeply draw on a large, hand-rolled cigarette of unknown filling."
The word became popular in the newsgroup, leading to coinages such as "herfers", "herfnicks" and "herfaholics". A number of Web pages record that a herf, in your meaning of a meeting of cigar fans (a herf presumably being a situation in which one herfs) was arranged by members of the newsgroup in April 1997 under the title of The Texas Herf On The Lake. A newspaper report three years later about another meeting that had been organized through the newsgroup is one of the few times the term has appeared on newsprint:
They are cigar fanciers. More than 100 of them in all shapes
and sizes came to York recently to swap stories, down some
beer, and, of course, puff happily on their favorite stogies.
These get-togethers are called herfs, and they're a big deal
for people with computers, a love of cigars and a willingness
to travel.
[Daily Herald (Tyrone, Pennsylvania), 18 May 1999.]
"Herf" is well established within the cigar fraternity, though rare to the point of being unknown outside it. One site describes it as "A lively gathering of cigar-smoking comrades who meet in a club, restaurant, cigar store or home to share their appreciation of fine cigars."
