Okay, now the language nerd in me wants to know if this is actually the origin for our idiom, “Blow smoke up one’s ass,” which used to be a more common way of saying gaslighting.

When I was a kid, all the adults in my life had that smallpox vaccination circle on their arm. And nobody even then remembered smallpox personally. My parents, whose smallpox vaccinations I had seen many times, were more worried about polio. I’ll never forget the time a polio infection scare gripped our small Ohio town. My parents rushed all three of us kids to a clinic so we could get our polio vaccinations ahead of schedule. Cuz no parent wants to see their children die from lack of ability to breathe or end up without the use of their legs.

I’m pretty sure if anybody had told them then that within the lifetimes of their children a huge segment of the public would resist life-saving vaccinations, they would have said, “stop blowing smoke up my ass.”

Yet here we are.