The Many Varieties of Cannabis and
Their Hazy, Crazy Etymologies
By
Howard Richler
Boston Sunday Herald-26 March 1967: According to one Federal Narcotics Bureau
agent, California ‘is flooded with marijuana’, which is better known by the
increasing numbers who smoke it as ‘pot’, ‘grass’
and ‘Mary J.’.
It
was sometime around March 26, 1967, that I indulged in cannabis for the first
time and it has been over fifty years since my last joint. As I metamorphosed
into a law-abiding citizen when I turned 30, I have refrained from using the
weed ever since but as the substance is now legal in Canada, I might indulge in
it after a long period of abstinence, but my preference is to ingest it
with a cookie rather than taking it into
my lungs.. As the above 52 year-old headline makes clear, cannabis has been
known by several names that keep a-changin’. Growing up in the 60s, the term
grass was common but one doesn’t hear this designation often nowadays.
While
the origins of terms such as grass and weed are obvious, the etymology of other
terms, similar to the effect cannabis often causes, are rather hazy.
For
example, one might imagine that the term
pot is somehow connected to a potted plant, however the OED
relates that it enjoys “an uncertain and disputed” etymology: “The most
popular theory explains the word as being derived from the Mexican Spanish words potiguaya ‘cannabis leaves’,
or potación de guaya, literally ‘drink
of grief,’ supposedly denoting a drink of wine or brandy in which marijuana
buds were steeped; however, no corroborating evidence has been found to support
the use of any of these terms in Spanish (although potiguaya is recorded in an English glossary of
drug terminology slightly earlier than the earliest example of the word in 1936.” Alternatively, however (and more boringly) the OED says that it could derive from the
sense of pot as a roundish container. As for the term “doobie” that refers to a
marijuana cigarette, all the OED states as to its source is “origin
unknown.” However, J.E. Lighter in his Historical Dictionary of American Slang proffers
the idea that the word comes from “dobby,” an attachment to a loom for weaving small
figures. Not surprisingly, the OED
relates that “marijuana” is a borrowing from the Spanish mariguana, or marihuana but
states that the Spanish origin is uncertain. One theory, however states that
the Spanish word originated from the Aztec language Nahuatl ‘s word from
“prisoner,” mallihuan.
I
noticed on Google Ngrams, which charts the frequency of words in the English
language, that the term “reefer” reached its popularity high in 1942. This is
probably because in 1936 a film called Reefer
Madness was released whose melodramatic theme alerted adolescents to the
grave consequences lest they are lured by drug pushers to ingest marijuana.
Among the possible effects elucidated in this didactic film were hallucinations,
hit and run accidents, attempted rapes and an inevitable descent into madness
caused by addiction. Once again, a definitive etymology is elusive but the term
most likely derives from the Mexican Spanish grifa, a term for cannabis. An alternate theory though sees the
term coming from the word “reef” which can refer to a section of a sail on
account of the cigarette resembling rolled-up sailcloth.
“Ganja”
is yet still another name for cannabis. Although the term is often associated
with the West Indies, the word derives from India and comes from the Hindi word
ganjha. For the term “joint,” the OED merely says “marijuana cigarette” but
when the drug sense of the word was first used in the 1930s, the OED informs that it referred to the “hypodermic
equipment used by drug addicts.”
Finally,
if you guessed that the reference to “colitas”
in the lyric “warm smell of
colitas rising up in the air” by The
Eagles in their classic Hotel
California is to marijuana, you are
correct. Colitas in Spanish means
little tails and in Mexican slang it refers to the buds of cannabis.
One caveat- While you can check out any time, you can never
leave.
Richler’s latest book
is Wordplay:Arranged and Deranged Wit
