COKE in the M aryland

[Jonathan Lighter]

What could be more passe' sounding than "pot" and "weed"?  Oh, I know ! "Grass."

JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: COKE in the M aryland
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At 9:30 AM -0500 3/7/05, David Bowie wrote:
>From: Jonathan Lighter
>
>
>
>: As for "dope," one assumes, perhaps less confidently, that "dope"
>: (fool) comes earlier than "dope" (illicit drugs). Furthermore,
>: "dope" (specif. "marijuana") is so common a term nowadays that to
>: refer to the drink in that way would be discordant. "Coke" (the
>: drug) interferes less because expensive, more strongly tabooed, and
>: less common on campus.
>
>I'm not sure that "dope" meaning marijuana is actually all so common
>nowadays--to me it seems like a horribly old-fashioned term, the kind of
>thing you laugh at when you see old shows on Nick at Nite, definitely not
>something that's really in active use *now*.
>
even in the collocation "smoke dope"? I'd be very surprised if
that's passé already. Wait, let me ask a handy 20-year-old
informant, home on spring break...

Hey, David's right (well, the sample size is small, but still...).
My informant did come up with the right gloss for "smoke dope", but
she hesitated briefly, and said that her familiarity with the
expression was from TV. (She questioned whether it would come up
much on Nick at Nite--maybe more likely on old SNL reruns.)

She informs me the unmarked form (well, she didn't call it unmarked,
but...) is "smoke pot", and the standard slang term would be "smoke
weed".

Larry


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