Search: why are cigars called stogies
Why: Last night, Veronica Mars followed the plastic surgeon who saw Logan on the bridge into a cigar shop. What's he doing in there!
Answer: First, it's not all of them - just the long thin cheap ones. "Stogie" is an abbreviation of the name of Conestoga, a town near Lancaster, PA, where cheap cigars are made and popular!
Because the drivers Conestoga wagons (based in tobacco country) always had a roll-your-own cigar stuck in their mouths, observers called them "stogies."
This kind of cigar is also called a cheroot, which comes from the French cheroute and Tamil curuttu/churuttu, "roll of tobacco":
A cylindrical cigar with both ends clipped during manufacture. Since cheroots do not taper, they are inexpensive to roll mechanically, and their low cost makes them particularly popular.
Source: ChaCha, Blog of Answers, Wikipedia
The More You Know: The word "cigar" comes from the Spanish cigarro, which they took from cigarrales, a Cuban word meaning a "place of leisure."
or
The word "cigar" originated from sikar, the Mayan-Indian word for "smoking," which became cigarro in Spanish, probably from Maya sicar, "to smoke rolled tobacco leaves," from sic, "tobacco."
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It's from or influenced by the Spanish word cigarra, "grasshopper".
