Monday, September 11, 2006

Pothead

Tuur has sent in this photo of a fellow concert attendee from Leuven, Belgium several weeks ago.



大麻
is Simplified Chinese for “Cannabis Sativa”, also known as “marijuana”, “pot”, “chronic”, “weed”, “grass”, “ganja”, “420”, “blunt” (not James Blunt), “dope”, “reefer”, “mary jane” or “mj”, “cheeba”.


13 comments:

  1. That first character (da) doesn't have a leg to stand on!

    (ducks)

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  2. 大麻 is Simplified Chinese

    Can you tell me what the traditional equivalent is?

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  3. Alan,

    The Traditional Chinese for marijuana is 大蔴, where there is a "grass" partial on top of the character.

    In Simplified Chinese, 痲 (medicial condition of numbness), 蔴 (hemp related plants), and 麻 (to bother) are the same character now - 麻.

    The is one of the reasons that Simplified Chinese characters have created much unnecessary confusion.

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  4. The upside down apostrophe in 麻 is a nice touch.

    *rolls eyes*

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  5. As far as I know, in Traditional Chinese, 大麻, instead of 大蔴, stands for marijuana. In Taiwan, we don't use "蔴" now.

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  6. LOL, my first impression looking at the picture was the katagana "na"(ナ) and 麻, but 大麻 sounds more logical.

    Regarding 蔴, I think 蔴 is a variant character rather than the traditional character version of 麻. 2 of the Taiwan-published dictionaries I checked(國語活用辭典 and 辭海) both uses 大麻.

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  7. well as for a start, the 林 part of 麻 is so wrong, the tree (木) on the left is written as 扌-left partial of "hand" radical. and the mistake on 大, one stroke missing, a big one indeed.

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  8. oh, addition to my previous post, the tree on the right is not 木, but more like 夫, with one stroke missing also.

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  9. Actually, in "麻", there are not two "木", but "朮" without the upright point. It is not easy to distinguish them from the screen writing. However, that's an important difference when the teacher taught me.

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  10. Well, as for the 麻 character, the original (traditional) one has 朮, while the Japanese simpflication has 木. The tattoo does not look like any of 'em

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  11. Tian,

    Thanks for the clarification of the simplified vs. traditional characters. I guess it may not be so simple after all... From what I can tell, 麻 may have come into wide use in the combination 大麻 well before the PRC's simplification efforts in the 1950's and so it is used not only in both Taiwan and the mainland but also in Japan. Thus, it may not fall into the “simplified” category in the most common sense.

    Alan

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  12. Technically, "blunt" refers to a particular method of smoking marijuana (rolled in cigarillo papers), and "4:20" does not refer to marijuana directly but is stoner slang for "time to smoke".

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  13. 4:20 is also 420, the police code used for someone in possession of drugs.

    Interesting how American police can go from 419 (Dead Body) to 420 (Possession)

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