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MAP posted-by: Beth

 

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Date: Thu, 26 Dec 2002 15:10:46 -0800

From: "D. Paul Stanford" <stanford@crrh.org>

Subject: 002 US: Language - Getting A Little Woozy Over 'Pot'

 

Newshawk: www.mapinc.org

Pubdate: Mon, 23 Dec 2002

Source: International Herald-Tribune (France)

Webpage: http://www.iht.com/articles/81165.html

Copyright: International Herald Tribune 2002

Contact: letters@iht.com

Website: http://www.iht.com/

Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/212

Author: William Safire

 

LANGUAGE: GETTING A LITTLE WOOZY OVER 'POT'

 

WASHINGTON -- Is America Going to Pot?" asked Time magazine on its cover

recently. The article was about the battle over legalizing marijuana, and

the headline was wordplay on the familiar expression going to pot

(synonymous with "going to hell in a handbasket"), which the headline

writer tied into the slang term for the hemp plant.

 

Scholarly potheads know the derivation of pot, the controlled psychoactive

substance: the word is rooted in the Mexican Spanish potiguaya, which are

marijuana leaves after their pods have been removed. The word may be

derived from potacion de guaya, a potation (from the Latin potere, "to

drink") that causes guaya, "lamentation" in Latin American Spanish.

Apparently, this was "the wine of grief" in which marijuana buds were

steeped. (The word marijuana could come from Mariguana, one of the Bahamian

islands, or from a seductive Maria Juana - Mary Jane. It's a mystery.)

 

The earliest citation for pot in its drug sense can be found in Chester

Himes's "Black on Black," a collection of stories and essays published in

1973, in a story written in 1938: "She made him smoke pot, and when he got

jagged, she put him out on the street." (Jagged is an 18th-century term for

"drunk," or - you guessed it - potted. For nonalcoholic intoxication, we

now say stoned or zoinked or wrecked.)

 

But the slang term pot may have been influenced by the aforementioned pod:

In his 1959 novel, "Naked Lunch," William Burroughs derided "a square wants

to come on hip. ... Talks about 'pod' and smokes it now and then."

 

All clear? (Actually, in reading this, you should be getting a little

woozy.) Now to the part stimulated by Time's headline: the origin of the

much earlier going to pot, which is by no means the road to marijuana.

 

"The riche welthie of his subjectes," went the 1542 translation of

Erasmus's Apophthegmes, "went dayly to the potte, wer chopped up." (I

report the archaic spelling, which triggers the question: Why did we change

the spelling of welthie to wealthy and dayly to daily? And doesn't the

ampersand - & - take less space than and? The old guys had it right.)

 

The phrase collector John Ray in 1670 defined to go to pot as "to perish;

to be done for; as by death, bad seasons, pecuniary difficulties and so

forth." A decade later, the poet John Dryden wrote, "Then all you heathen

wits shall go to pot/For disbelieving of a Popish plot."

 

The cannibalistic origin of the metaphor - to chop people up into edible

portions and stew them in a pot until tender - disappeared over the

centuries. The meaning is now "to deteriorate; to fall apart; to go to

seed." Colleen Barrett, president of the profitable, no-frills Southwest

Airlines (bring your own lunch), told reporters recently, "A nongrowing

company is the quickest way to have morale go to pot."

 

What do you take at executives of nongrowing companies? Our final entry in

the ubiquitous pot derby: a potshot.

 

The Associated Press reporter covering the good-humored Al Smith dinner in

New York two months ago reported that Secretary of State Colin Powell,

before turning serious, "took several more potshots at Saddam and even

poked fun at American politicians."

 

Across the country at the same time, The Los Angeles Times, reporting on

the trend toward more "scantily clad women of impossible proportions" in

video games, quoted a responsible industry executive as complaining, "With

the strip-bar stuff, it's just too easy to open up the industry to potshots."

 

This comes from taking a shot only for the purpose of filling the pot for a

meal, usually at an easy target and with no heed to the rules of sport

hunting or the preservation of the head for mounting. It was an elitist

derogation of hungry hunters who killed game to put food on the family

table. "Most people took potshots," sneered an arbiter of social life in

the reign of Queen Anne, "and would not risk shooting at a bird on the

wing." So, too, in politics today.

 

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