Did you know we call good Cannabis Chronic because of Snoop Dogg‘s confusion as a teenager.
Yes, the Snoop Dogg.
He tells the story to Seth Rogen starting at the 10-minute mark below:
Basically when Snoop and his friends first smoked hydroponic weed, they got so baked they misheard/remembered hydro-ponic as hydro-chronic.
They kept calling it that and eventually used it as the title of Dr. Dre’s first album, The Chronic, in 1992, putting it into the mainstream.
A lot of Cannabis slang has an interesting back story.
Take the term 4:20.
Even your grandma knows what it means when someone says 4:20.
But where does it come from?
Back in 1971, a group of five high schoolers in San Rafael, Calif. got tipped off to an outdoor grow they could harvest if they could find, so they made a code for meeting up and discussing the plan.
“4:20 Louis” they’d say, then meet after classes at the Louis Pasteur statue in front of their school.
The Louis Pasteur statue in front of San Rafael High School.
They didn’t find the weed but kept using the code to meet and smoke and eventually the ‘Louis’ part got dropped as they’d meet other places too.
One of the group later became a roadie for a member of the Grateful Dead, who was also from San Rafael. They used 4:20 on some of their flyers for shows, which spread it among Deadheads, and eventually it was picked up by High Times in an article about Cannabis slang and terminology, spreading it to the mainstream.
Some Cannabis slang is fairly straight forward.
We call them “dabs” because you dab a concentrate onto heat to take a hit.
Same with the word “concentrates,” THC and other terpenes are concentrated together, making it stronger than smoking regular flower.
Distillates are distilled.
Other words aren’t as straight forward. Take joint for example.
If I ask you to roll a joint, you’d know what I mean, but why do we call it that?
The first use of the word to refer to a Cannabis cigarette was in a 1938 New Yorker article by Meyer Berger titled Tea for a Viper, which also gave us the term roach for the leftover nub of a joint.
Of course, words will be in use long before they’re first written down.
The word joint had been used since the early 1800s to mean a place where nefarious activities happen, like a bar or an opium den.
The roots of that can be traced back to the French word, Joindre, which means to join or bring together (illegal bars and opium dens were usually side rooms joined to the main one).
A blunt is when you use a cigar paper to roll a joint (and they usually have tobacco added). The name comes from New York, where Phillies Blunt cigars were first used, with blunt referring to the size.
Another word with a fuzzy origin is doobie.
Some say it comes from a popular character on the show Romper Room during the 1950s and 60s, Mr. Do Bee. Others would argue it’s linked to the character Dobie Gillis, who was reportedly the inspiration for Shaggy in The Adventures of Scooby Doo.
Maybe it was a combination of both.
And joints are called spliffs in Jamaica and the West Indies. That’s a blending of the word split, which is a rolling paper, and whiff, which refers to the pungent smell of Ganja when it’s smoked.