Every generation talks about weed differently. While few people today still call it “grass” for instance, millennials have developed their own jargon around the cannabis plant. The makers of a group messaging app called Blend added AI bots to the interface in order to study how young people talk to one another. On 4/20, they looked at how they talked about weed, in particular.
Using data from public group chats among 300,000 of the app’s millennial users, Blend’s team was able to analyze how often and how many millennials said what about weed.
They found that the most common phrase used to discuss smoking weed was simply “let’s smoke,” used by 44 percent of millennial users. Second to that was “get lit” at 17 percent, followed by “blaze” at 14 percent, and “let’s burn” at 10 percent. Other phrases used to describe smoking weed included “match” (seven percent), “blow tree” (three percent), “burn tree” (two percent), “trying to chief” (two percent) and “put one in the air” (one percent).
Meanwhile, the Blend research team also looked at which strains millennials mentioned most frequently. The top strain with the most mentions was Blue Dream at 38 percent, followed by GDP, or Granddaddy Purple, at 18 percent, Sour Diesel at 16 percent, and Cookies at 11 percent. Less prominent strains included OG (eight percent), Cheese (four percent), blueberry (three percent), white widow (one percent), and green crack (one percent).
And not only did Blend look at words, but also at emojis. The most popular emoji associated with smoking weed was the egg in a pan emoji (27percent). Next was the pizza slice emoji (17 percent), then the avocado emoji (16 percent), and the popcorn emoji (12 percent). Less popular were the french fries emoji (nine percent), the hamburger emoji (eight percent), the ice cream cone emoji (five percent), the chocolate bar emoji (four percent), and the lollipop emoji (two percent).
It seems that the most popular emojis refer to munchies you eat when you’re high, while the candy emojis might refer to cannabis-infused edibles.
And while Blend didn’t look at the most popular names for weed itself, there are at least 1,200 monikers for the plant. Some of them are based on the fact that cannabis is a plant (for example, “herb,” “bud,” or “green”), while others come from other languages, for instance (“pot” comes from “potiguaya,” the Spanish word for marijuana leaves, while “ganja” comes from the Hindi word for the hemp plant).
It’s likely, as the cannabis industry expands and more technology is built around the plant, that the language used to talk about weed will change even more rapidly in the coming years. For instance, when you hear the word “pen” do you think of a vaporizer or a writing instrument? Examples like this are sure to become more prevalent.
