Gone to pot: Which words should we use to talk about weed?
By Hilary Brueck
Reaching for the reefer, celebrating 4/20 or lighting up a little “hay” is no longer a secret in Colorado. It’s been legal to buy weed here for nine months now, and the drug’s movement into the mainstream may not just be changing how people consume the substance, it might also be shifting our vocabulary.
Words and metaphors people use to talk about marijuana have made the drug sound innocent and innocuous (mary jane, grass, herb) and transgressive and underground (chronic, dope, Don Juan). Since the drug has historically been used in the shadows, it’s bred a lot of inventive language. Take the word pot, for example, says Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at UC Berkeley and NPR "Fresh Air" contributor.
“Pot probably comes from the Mexican ‘potiguaya,’ which is a word for seeds, which may come from the expression ‘potacion de gauays,’ which would mean ‘a sorrow soup,’ which was some kind of concoction involving marijuana," he says. "How it got shortened to ‘pot’ is unclear, but it was probably around the 1930s that Americans started using that word.”...