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Apr 13, 2020 · Here at MERRY JANE, one of our favorite terms for cannabis is, well, “Mary Jane.” While “MERRY JANE,” spelled with an E and two Rs, comes from the 2007 feel-good weed anthem by Snoop...
Apr 19, 2022 · The Most Popular Theory Why Mary Jane Is Slang For Marijuana. Hector Vivas/Getty Images. By Aaron Homer April 19, 2022 4:00 pm EST. Humans have been using the cannabis plant to alter their consciousness for thousands of years, according to Science.
Dec 28, 2023 · Why do they call weed Mary Jane? There are many theories about how Mary Jane became slang for weed, but few direct connections. One of the most promising theories connects it to the Spanish language.
- Giggle Smoke
- Goof Butts
- Muggle
- Salt and Pepper
- Mezz
- 7., and 8. Mary Warner, Mary Ann, and Mary and Johnny
- Jive
- Alice B. Toklas Brownies
- Catnip
- Rainy Day Woman
For American law enforcement in the 1930s, giggle smoke was no laughing matter. The jazz age had birthed a marijuana movement among the nation’s youth, and state officials pushed to ban what they considered a highly dangerous narcotic. “[Smokers] refer to the cigarettes as ‘muggles,’ and to the effect as a ‘giggle,’ a local Alabama newspaper explai...
Another term that gained prominence in the 1930s and 1940s was goof butts, which described marijuana cigarettes. The smoking fad wasn’t specific to teenagers—Hollywood stars like The Night of the Hunter’s Robert Mitchum enjoyed cannabis just as much, if not more. “Hollywood people are jaded,” one psychiatrist from the area claimedin a 1948 newspape...
These days, the word muggle makes most people think of non-magical folk in the Harry Potter series. But beginning in the 1920s, people used it to describe marijuana or marijuana cigarettes. Louis Armstrong—a cannabis fan himself—titled a composition “Muggles” in 1928, and the term’s popularity continued into the mid-20th century. Raymond Chandler e...
Though it’s unclear exactly how these two dining table fixtures relate to cannabis, salt and pepper became an expression for marijuana at least as early as the 1940s. In jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow’s 1946 memoir Really the Blues, one character mentions“blowin’ salt and pepper till my hair hurts.”
Mezzrow wasn’t just a chronicler of weed lingo—he smoked (and sold) so much of it in 1930s Harlem that his name became synonymous with the stuff itself. Mezz referred to marijuana, and mezzroll described “the kind of fat, well-packed and clean cigarette I used to roll,” Mezzrow wrote in Really the Blues.
Mary Jane may be the most widely recognized personification of the Spanish word marijuana these days, but it’s not the only cheeky pseudo-translation; the drug also answered to “Mary Warner” as early as 1923. By the late 1960s, the moniker had fallen out of fashion. “It wasn’t always called ‘pot,’” Long Branch, New Jersey’s The Daily Record explain...
In 1936, Stuff Smith and His Onyx Club Boys released a jaunty swing track called “Here Comes the Man With the Jive,” about a man who “takes away your blues” whenever he shows up with marijuana to share. Jive was common slang for that particular drug at the time, but people had startedusing it to reference heroin—or just drugs in general—by the 1950...
In 1954, writer (and Gertrude Stein’s longtime partner) Alice B. Toklas published a cookbook in England with a recipe for “Haschich Fudge,” which “might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR.” Toklas had gotten the recipe from painter Brion Gysin, and hadn’t realized the cannabis-laced confect...
If you got catnipped in the 1960s, someone sold you some marijuana that was actually a mixture of catnip—the minty herb that drives cats crazy—and cannabis. Or, if you were really gullible, it might only be catnip. As William S. Burroughs wrote in his 1959 novel Naked Lunch, catnip was “frequently passed on the incautious or uninstructed,” since it...
At face value, the repetition of “They’ll stone you” in Bob Dylan’s 1966 song “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” seems to symbolize the inevitability of societal punishment no matter what you do. But some listeners latched onto the line “Everybody must get stoned” as a ringing endorsement for marijuana. “In the shifting, multi-level jargon of teenagers, to...
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- Katy Steinmetz
- Because of its effects. airplane – because it gets one “high.” Also see “parachute” and “pocket rocket” amnesia – because it can make one forgetful. climb – might be a play on getting “high,” might be a play on “climbing the walls”
- Because people like it. ace – slang for something superior. baby – a term of affection for the drug. green goddess – green for the color, goddess for the experience.
- Because it is a (green) plant. alfalfa – also slang for beard, money and tobacco. asparagus – also broccoli, parsley, sassafras and turnip greens. bud – the name for the part of the cannabis plant that is smoked.
- Because of language. Aunt Mary – a pun on marijuana, just like Mary Jane, Mary Warner, Mary Weaver, and Mary and Johnny. da kine – this Hawaiian surf slang can refer to anything for which one forgets the precise name.
Jul 20, 2010 · Marijuana is the dried leaves and female flowers of the hemp plant. The word’s origin dates back to the late nineteenth century. It is an Americanism for the Mexican Spanish marihuana or mariguana, which is associated with the personal name María Juana. Mary Jane, by the way, is the English version of María Juana.
Jul 15, 2019 · From Mary Jane to marijuana: The ever-evolving language for weed. The recreational drug that secured its place in popular culture long ago is entering a new era of respectability.
