Weed, bud, and loud are names used for cannabis. But what about pot? While the word “pot” is still used by some referring to cannabis, a younger generation appears to shy away from the label.
“I hear someone say ‘pot,’ I think it’s some old person,” said 32-year-old Kenjuan Congo Jr. of the New Castle area, adding his preferred term for cannabis is slightly more volatile: “If it’s good weed, we call it ‘gas.'”
Cannabis nicknames have existed for generations with their usage changing for different reasons. Some come up with new monikers to fit specific communities, while other names are used to bond with one another and some are used for secrecy.
“Language evolves with society and culture, and of course younger generations like to jettison the things their parents told them and taught them,” said Philip Lamy, a Vermont State University sociology and anthropology professor and coordinator of the school’s Cannabis Studies Program. “They want to do their own version of the same old thing.”
But as the drug’s usage is legitimized through medical use and recreational legalization, as it has in Delaware, some are dropping such nicknames as pot, grass, devil’s lettuce and Mary Jane — handles once used by older generations to identify wacky tobacky.
“I think culture is a social phenomenon that changes over time,” Congo said while attending the Ninth Annual Repeal Day Rally in Wilmington on Saturday. Dec. 7.
“The English language changes over time,” he said. “Language is always evolving, like with anything, and it’s just a natural evolution in the word.”
More: As Wilmington debates legal weed, misconceptions about plant impact abound in discussions
Origins of pot and other names
A lot of names used for cannabis have developed from even older words for the leafy plant.
“I can’t claim to know the meaning or origins of the literally hundreds, maybe thousands, of names applied to cannabis, but I know more than a few,” said Lamy who suspects the term “pot” is a derivative of the Spanish word potiguaya or potaguaya.
“It’s a type of plant that cows and horses eat in Central America, including in Mexico,” he said. “It’s kind of like a local weed that makes them sick.”
The term “pot” is not the only moniker given to cannabis — a plant whose origins go back to Central China where it is one of the earliest crops to be cultivated for its fibers that are used to make ropes and clothing, to treat health problems, and yes, for its intoxicating tendencies.
“That was a central plant along with rice and wheat and things like that,” Lamy said. “And they’d probably been using it already for thousands of years before they became agricultural farmers.”
As cannabis made its way around the globe, other names were assigned to it and then other names evolved from that.
Hash, for example, comes from the Hashish, an Arabic word for dried grass.
Some names made their way across the globe and become so integrated in their new homes, such as the word ganja. While the word is synonymous with Jamaica, it originally comes from India. In this case, Lamy said, African slaves in Jamaica picked up the word after interacting with Indian servants working on the Caribbean island.
Other Indian or Hindu terms associated with cannabis in Jamaica are chalice and chillum — types of cannabis smoking pipes.
“These are Indian language terms that have become very common in Jamaica among the Rastafarians,” Lamy said. “Not just Rastafarians. Jamaicans in general.”
A nefarious turn
Cannabis’ different names have also been used to stigmatize people of color, especially in the early 20th Century when terms such as “reefer” and “marijuana” were used to demonize it by associating it with Blacks and Mexican immigrants.
Harry Anslinger, the first director of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics which later became the Drug Enforcement Administration, is often blamed for stigmatizing marijuana by associating it with Mexican immigrants in the early 1900s, Lamy said.
“Anslinger devised a discredited etymology for marijuana by associating it with the Aztecs, claiming the word came from the Aztec malihua or mallihuan, which he argued was made from the root mallin (a prisoner) and hua (of or suggesting a property),” Lamy said. “Therefore meaning a prisoner taken captive by the plant.”
This is why some are asking people stop using the word marijuana.
“He and his supporters in the media at the time, especially William Randolph Hearst, also popularized ‘devils’ lettuce’ to scare the populace,” he added. “Interestingly, I sometimes hear young folks use this term.”
Anslinger also went after Black jazz musicians, who according to Lamy often and openly sang about “reefer” — a term for cannabis that jazz musicians were using in the 1920s through the 1940s. The word reefer, Lamy said, is believed to come from the Spanish word “grifa” which means intoxicated.
“They weren’t trying to hide it,” Lamy said of the jazz musicians. “When we look up people like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and so many other great jazz musicians, [they] weren’t trying to hide it.”
Anslinger’s biggest target, however, ended up being Billie Holiday.
After several arrests, Holiday ended up losing her performer’s license and was forced to quit singing in the states. She also spent a year in prison.
As Holiday was dying in a hospital after being diagnosed with cirrhosis, she was surrounded by law enforcement who claimed they’d found heroin in her room and arrested her. She died about a month later in 1959 — still in her New York City hospital room.
Lamy said it wasn’t long after that musicians became more discreet.
“It began to be hidden, really, in the late 60s, early 70s when the [President Richard] Nixon administration made [cannabis] illegal,” he said.
While the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 regulated cannabis, essentially an overbearing fee that ended its recreational use, the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 ended all use of the drug by categorizing it as a Schedule I substance — placing it at the same level as heroin and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD).
This is when the code words and metaphors began being used in music.
“The Beatles have a lot of songs with references to marijuana in them with never really mentioning it,” he said.
Lamy, a huge Beatles’ fan, said one song he was surprised to learn was about cannabis is “Got to Get You Into My Life,” which was written by Paul McCartney.
While most people think McCartney is talking about a girl, Lamy said the singer later explained he’d recently tried cannabis and now wanted the drug in his life.
“It didn’t stop hundreds of bands at the time from referencing it,” Lamy said. “But they were very cautious about being that explicit about it.”
Ending pot and other slang?
As marijuana legalization grows and becomes more of a business, there’s been a shift to more clinical names that distance themselves from slang terms that carry a stigma evoking images of lazy, overweight dudes who’ve become dimwitted as they smoke their lives away.
This is part of an effort to normalize cannabis whose sales, both medical and recreational, are expected to reach $33.6 billion nationally by the end of this year, with projections indicating upwards of $53.5 billion by 2027, according to BGM, a financial services provider.
Kamren Nikolich, who was awarded an open cultivation license in Kent County earlier this year, agrees he’s using the word “cannabis” as his business develops and in other formal settings. But the Wilmington resident says socially he may call it by something else.
“It’s about context,” he said. “If I’m looking at like a jar, I wouldn’t refer to it as cannabis in that situation. I would probably be more specific and say, like the buds or the flowers or something along those lines.”
Nikolich believes the slang terms will stick around, especially with people who have been using them for some time.
H/T: yahoo.com
