Buyer bewareĪ problem with relying on slang to identify drugs is meanings change over time. “Shelving a pinger” refers to inserting a drug in the anus. Slang can also describe ways drugs are used. By 2012,, a UK website that regularly reports on popular and emerging drug use, was using the term pinger to describe MDMA. Yvette de Wit/UnsplashĪnd the term’s use has spread out of Australia. None of these examples refer to MDMA specifically, but there’s an assumption people know what the word pinger means, including the drug’s use and effects.ĭrug slang is part of the music festival vernacular. >“I had so many pingers last night I was tripping balls”.Īn Australian video game called Big City Earnez has players collecting “pingaz” – things that look like tablets – in different Melbourne suburbs and hiding from the police.
More recently the word pinger has appeared in several pop culture dictionaries with examples related to drug use. The first reference to pingers is reported to be in the glossary of an Australian surfing book published in 2003. The drug they purchase could be completely different to what they expected.Įxplainer: what is nitrous oxide (or nangs) and how dangerous is it? Most festival goers attend few events and are only occasional users of illegal drugs, so they may be unfamiliar with slang names and what drug they refer to. The term “pinger” (or pinga) is thought to be an Australian creation used to refer to MDMA. MDMA (3,4- methylenedioxymethamphetamine), or ecstasy, is one of the drugs people take most commonly at music festivals. From PingersĪs we find ourselves at the height of music festival season, let’s look at a timely example. The use of slang can indicate to others a person uses drugs. Researchers also believe they get better results from surveys if they use the same language as people using drugs. The slang words can be metaphors for the drug effects or appearance, giving health professionals an understanding of a person’s drug use experience. Another study used slang terms in Instagram hashtags to document drug use patterns.įor clinicians and researchers, slang offers insights into drug users’ beliefs and behaviours, which can in turn guide interventions. More recently, one study analysed Twitter posts to identify new slang. How the dictionary is totes taking up the vernacular The authors found people in prison, who commonly used opiates, knew more slang words for heroin than college students did.
In 1979, researchers created a drug slang association test to identify if the number of slang names people knew related to their use of a drug type. With this in mind, researchers seek to identify drug subcultures through understanding language use. The use of slang indicates a person uses drugs because they know the secret language of a subculture. The definition included how beginners were taught special smoking techniques by hostesses, likely sex workers. For example, Maurer’s glossary featured the term “to vipe”, meaning to smoke marijuana. The definitions reflect the social and cultural values around drug-taking practices at the time. The aim was to guide law enforcement as well as to inform doctors, parents and teachers about drug use. Clinicians and people who study drug use have attempted to catalogue slang terms for drug use since the 1930s.ĭavid Maurer, an American linguistics professor who studied the use of language in the American underworld, published the first glossary of drug slang terms in 1936.
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