So. Your Humble Blogger was supervising our student workers last night, as I am wont to do, or at least as I am paid to do, when one of our workers says more or less this: A guy just totally walked by the library doors smoking a blunt!<\/i>\n
Now, my reaction was surprise that a marijuana cigarette would, in such an exchange, be referred to as a blunt. Not that I didn’t understand the term, but I have the sense that back in the early nineties, when I was the age that this person is now, the word blunt<\/i> would have been an old-fashioned, somewhat pretentious or self-conscious way for somebody to refer to a marijuana cigarette. Such an item would have been called a joint<\/i>, which (further investigation revealed) is a term still in use. I’m not sure what else would have been used in the situation. To the best of my recollection, a classmate might have told me that a guy just walked by the library doors smoking a fattie<\/i>, but that would not have been a term used from a student to a supervisor. Similarly a spliff<\/i> or a doobie<\/i> or a jay<\/i>, I suppose, or perhaps even reefer<\/i>, used jocularly and as a way of indicating that the speaker is of course totally unfamiliar with such items. But from a student to a supervisor? It couldn’t have been anything else but joint<\/i>.\n
I mean, without changing the terms of the sentence—I might have told a middle-aged supervisor that somebody walked by smoking marijuana, or even I suppose smoking weed, or just smoking something<\/i>. Actually, I can’t really imagine telling the supervisor at all. Not that it was all that common, or all that uncommon, just not something I would have brought up in conversation, I think. Although I should say that the person had just come in, and I was the first person she had the opportunity to tell about it, so there’s that.\n
I should add that we are both white, both of middle-class (or upper-middle-class) suburban backgrounds. We are friendly enough, occasionally chat about topics not directly library-related, but aren’t best buddies. We are friendly enough to make jokes about illegal narcotics. I myself have never smoked the stuff (too cheap, mostly, and sensitive lungs) and the student in question is, you know, familiar enough with the smell of it (as I am, I suppose, if I am sufficiently decongested to have any olfactory sense worth the name) but not obviously in what we used to call the drug culture. I imagine all that stuff would make a difference in the jargon, but I have no idea exactly what that difference would be.\n
Any ideas?\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger didn’t come here to fuck around, I came here to smoke! Then I reach across the table and I grab your bony sleeves, and I crumble your body between my hands like dried and brittle leaves, and I flick out all your teeth and bones like useless stems and seeds, and I roll you in a Zig-zag, and light you like a roach. And so on, and so forth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[198],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-libraries"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13587"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19302,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13587\/revisions\/19302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}