The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Drugs

Dope is a terrible thing, and is particularly bad for racehorses. Drug a racehorse just a little bit and you ruin his performance, which is why it’s absolutely necessary for a betting man to know in advance which horses have been doped and which are clean-living and ready to win. Such a gambler is said to have the dope on a race: the inside knowledge of which runner has gone to pot.

Pot itself has nothing to do with pots and pans, but comes from the Mexican-Spanish word potiguaya, which means marijuana leaves. And marijuana is a Mexification of Mary Jane for reasons that everybody is much too stoned to remember. Another Mexican part of drug language is reefer, which comes from grifo, a word for a drug addict south of the border.

In fact, the vocabulary of drugs is as exotic as their origins. The assassins would, if they did smoke hashish, have done so through a hookah, a small pot through which the intoxicating vapours are allowed to bubble. When American troops took up doing the same thing during the Vietnam War, they took the local Thai word for a hookah, buang, and turned it into bong.

Of course, the terminology of drugs is a matter of dispute, legend and stoned supposition. Nobody is utterly sure whether a joint is something smoked in an opium joint, or whether it’s something that’s shared and therefore is jointly owned. Nor does anybody have any idea why people from 1920s New Orleans called joints muggles, but it sheds an interesting new light on the Harry Potter novels (another of Rowling’s characters is called Mundungus, which is an archaic word for low-grade tobacco). Whoever invented the word spliff didn’t bother to write down why.

Dope itself was originally a kind of thick sauce called doop into which Dutch people would dip pieces of bread. The sense transferred over to drugs only when people started smoking a thick and gloopy preparation of opium. Given that Amsterdam’s dope cafes have now become famous throughout the world, it’s a little disappointing that any high you might receive from the original Dutch doop would be a placebo effect.