"hookah" is an accepted and correct word in written English
You can use it when referring to the water pipe used for smoking flavored tobacco, typically in a social setting. For example, "I went to a hookah lounge with friends last night."
The residents' ideas for the living room ranged wildly: a hookah lounge; after-school language classes; Champions League screenings; art exhibitions.
In fluorescent-strip-lit shops, in snatched exchanges in the pedestrian crush, as a hookah is passed around a tea-stall, again and again, the stories are the same.
Jonathan Fair of One2One theorises that Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland", in which a shrunken Alice meets a water-pipe-smoking caterpillar, has had something to do with it.Despite its Middle Eastern pretensions, American hookah is not quite like the Egyptian kind.
Letters are welcome via e-mail to [email protected] woman's place?SIR – I am stunned that a picture of the woman enjoying a hookah is captioned "Emancipation in Beirut" ("Out of the shadows, into the world", June 19th, print edition only).
Tables had had ears for too long, with loudmouths locked up under emergency laws.The Riche also faced dastardly new competitors, from sports bars and foreign chains to low-rent hookah joints and latterly the internet.
"We set up a whole hookah system, including equipment, staff training and management advice".
And nobody blinks at the sight of a veiled lady getting a soothing public nicotine fix.Cairo's hookah aficionados admit that the instrument was invented in Ottoman Turkey, but claim it was perfected in Egypt.
Outside her front door there is a heap of builder's rubbish and a circle of armchairs and sofas under a pink, rain-soaked awning, which she says was her landlord's attempt to create a shisha (hookah) lounge.
But one downtown Austin bar, the Red Fez, no longer offers hookah.
Smoking a hookah alone in public without a veil is not unusual in Lebanon, or indeed many other Arab countries.
But legitimate hookah bars started appearing in California in the late 1990s, and, despite the anti-smoking surge, they are booming, especially in college towns.In this section Swamped A voucher for your thoughts A Bush referendum?
