How marijuana came to be called the culinary ‘POT’ and the lady ‘Mary Jane’?
Reasons to how marijuana got the titles like ganja, hemp, hashish etc. are simply due to several parts and extracts of the crop giving its name a benefit of variability. But words like pot and Mary Jane sound peculiar to anyone who hears them as vernacular replacements to the cannabis in our language for the first time. These two specific words have the etymological significances with their origins tracing back to, majorly, the Spanish words.
POT
Pot could be wrongly interpreted as a word started to be used in cookery environment. But the fact is, ‘pot’ has no links with the culinary stuff. Pot has been recognized as one of the most widespread terms used for marijuana specially incase of smoking. It received its English figure in 1930s as it came to be used by Americans as a shortening of the Spanish word potiguaya or potaguaya which is derived from the name of brandy or wine in which marijuana buds are imbued, potacion de guaya, which literally means “drink of grief”.
Agreeably, phrase ‘potacion de guaya’ after being imported as a smoking commodity ‘Pot’ in America got its core meaning transformed to “smoke of relief”. In language, Pot and marijuana both are used in place of cannabis and they fall in the same domain of words adopted from other languages, precisely Spanish.
MARY JANE
Call MJ as Michael Jackson or Mary Jane as the beautiful lover of Peter Parker, MJ or Mary Jane for a smoker is only and only cannabis. For understanding the basis of Mary Jane as herb, we backtrack the original pieces of the history of word marijuana itself. Marijuana which obtained the ‘j’ in its spelling from a Spanish Mexican word marihuana is an English derivative of this same word. This has links with the far-off name Mary Jane in Spanish. In fact, the Mexican word marihuana was popularized by the opponents of drug in America who demonized the drug as a foreign product.
The Spanish speakers directly found the similar word Mari-Juana in their language which was a popular substitute for Maria-Juana, equivalent to Mary Jane in English. Later, after marijuana was brought into use, this word also found settlement in English language but as a slang term, not as a hypothetical usage of its Spanish equivalent Maria-Juana in English. The occurrence of Mary Jane in English has a cyclic derivation. From Spanish Maria-Juana and Mexican marihuana to English marijuana to, again, Maria juana in English, and we call it MARY JANE.
