Origin of the term “four-twenty”?
I had not heard it till I moved from D.C. to California where it’s used as code for smoking marijuana. 4:20 in the afternoon is understood to be a good time to smoke a bowl. I climbed a landmark tree on the University of California at Santa Cruz Campus, and found a receipt from a drugstore impaled on a twig on one of the uppermost branches. It looked completely unremarkable to me but I imagined there must be something of significance about it that I was missing. I mentioned it to one of my fellow climbers and he pointed out that the due amount was $4.20. Apparently this is a magic number. I have been told its use spans the country and that companies have incorporated it into their names, so I was a bit surprised when I did a search for it here in the SD and turned up no hits. As its connotative use relates to smoking pot, I imagine it will be a challenge to pin down it’s original denotative use but perhaps someone will at least get close.
Here is what the marijuana afficionado magazine High Times has to say about it:
http://www.hightimes.com/htsite/lounge/content.php?page=lounge_02080718&tpage=1&cmnt=&PHPSESSID=5d8f7c776a279f11db1bcd1041a6fd9d