Are you a fan of wrangling over cannabis nomenclature? Or are you one of those people who wishes it would all just stop? Good news, either way, because Drs. Anna Schwabe and Daniela Vergara have published The Debated Nomenclature of Cannabis sativa, which clears up – among other things – how and why, when you’re speaking and writing about cannabis, it’s ok to use the term ‘strain’.
Slowly – very, very slowly – we’re getting there. ‘Cannabis sativa’ is a formal name for a single highly diverse species, the plant we know informally as ‘cannabis’. ‘Landrace’ is an irritating technical term that involves an archaic form of the word ‘race’ but denotes traditional breeds of cannabis – i.e., domesticated, not wild, varieties. And yes, when you’re chatting about your favourite breed of weed, it’s totally ok for you to use the word ‘strain’.
As someone who finds pedantry a colossal pain but can’t resist the impulse to try beating the pedants at their own game, I blogged a piece back in 2023, when the “Never say ‘strain’!” thing was raging on cannabis social media: Can the term ‘strain’ be applied to Cannabis?
Most of my two cents can be found there. But there is one concept I should have cleared up, which comes from the science of linguistics, and that’s ‘register’. A ‘register’ is “a specific variety of language or style of usage determined by social context, purpose, audience, and location.”
Most of the confusion about the whole ‘strain’ thing is coming from folks who’ve not got a hold on the salience of register. That confusion goes hand in hand with not getting how linguistics places primacy on usage. To put this another way, the job of lexicographers, the folks who compile dictionaries, is first and foremost to record how people speak and write, not to tell people they’re making mistakes. Dictionaries are living and evolving records of established usage. They track what people say and write.
I’m not a fan of Merriam-Webster, but nevertheless, take the current definition of ‘strain’ in Merriam-Webster: “a specific subtype within a biological species and especially one possessing a distinct genetic variation.” So, there it is. The way aficionados like you and me are using ‘strain’ is established Standard English – i.e., “well established by usage in the formal and informal speech and writing of educated speakers, and widely recognized as acceptable wherever English is spoken and understood.”
On the technical stuff, Drs Schwabe and Vergara do great work clearing up why it’s sensible and practical to incorporate ‘strain’ into formal register, i.e., into scientific cannabis nomenclature, basing their arguments on the grounds of the condition in which most cultivated forms of cannabis currently exist, expanding upon the case made a few years back by Ernest Small and John McPartland.
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The feature image shows our Sudanese landrace outdoors this summer in North America.
