When I wanted to pick a theme for this report I looked through course materials and decided to write about some kind of slang. I knew that in the web site for English Translators – Interpreters, made by my course mate Aleksandrs Emsis, are links to all kind of slang dictionaries, like A Prisoner’s Dictionary, Australian Slang, Playground Slang and a lot of other. I discovered there all kinds of street drug slang dictionaries(e.g. of Amphetamine, Cocaine, Heroin etc) and decided that this is a thing, which is likely not to be much discussed in our lectures at the Ventspils College, so the one, which could be an interesting and necessary topic for the would-be translators and interpreters. It is often dealt with such words in the films (e.g. “Scary movie”) and not always the meaning is clear, so this could be a helpful report for better understanding.
After looking through all accessible materials about street drug slang, I have decided to narrow this theme only to the one particular kind of drugs. I was forced to do this because only in one of the sources, I’ve found in the net, amount was over than 2300 words (street terms) that refers to specific drug types or drug activity. I was shocked, but it made my interest to grow. After choosing one drug type – marijuana – I understood that even this is very wide topic to discuss about. How can people make so many synonyms of one word and things related to it? In one of the three databases I’ve downloaded, I counted 527 entries, in the second and third there were 87 and 83 entries but these were better defined as those were in the first source. A huge number of all these entries were different synonyms of the word marijuana, but all others described feelings after using it or described preparation and smoking. …
