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.