The word “flue” is employed in literature both in its literal sense—as a passageway for smoke—and in more playful or metaphorical ways. For instance, Henry Scadding describes a winter fireplace’s flue as a tubular channel bored through a hillside [1], while Edgar Allan Poe uses the term quite literally in depicting the movement of cleaning brushes along every flue in a house [2][3]. In a distinct twist, Thomas Nash jumbles its usage with playful, archaic variations such as “flue on hir” in his ballad [4][5], and Lewis Carroll even fancies the flue as a mischievous, almost personified element in the chaotic world of chimney-pots [6]. James Joyce transforms the term into a musical metaphor as notes “blew through the flue” in Ulysses [7], and Nathaniel Hawthorne uses the imagery of smoke soaring upward through a kitchen chimney’s great black flue to evoke the dissolution of a house into the sky [8]. The word also appears in more technical or domestic contexts—illustrated by its role in discussions of caffeine extraction from roaster-flue gases [9][10], its mention in detailing household features in works like Howards End [11] and How the Other Half Lives [12], as well as in curious explanatory passages by Thomas Twain [13]—and even in poetic lines about ascending tobacco smoke [14] and in evolving editorial treatments [15][16].