weed vs weeds
Who taught: Jean and Lorrie
Groundhog (source: http://brookeshelf.wordpress.com/)
There are glass french doors in my dining room through which I can see my backyard. Every evening, I see a groundhog that comes into my backyard, trying to find something to eat for his dinner, I guess. It is very funny to watch him because he does not eat lawn at all. He eats something else. You know what it is?
One day, as I see the groundhog, enjoying his dinner, I thought it is a pretty interesting thing to share with my friends. So, I wrote on my Facebook, saying, “Groundhog in my backyard. He really enjoys weed,” along with a picture. Now, my non-native English speakers, do you find anything weird from what I said. Probably not much, right?
A few minutes later, my friend Jean added a comment, “Are you growing weed in your backyard? You might not want to publicize that on FB ;)” Well, at that moment, I did realize that what she meant because I know there is a TV show, called weeds. My friend, Lorrie, also commented later. She said, “weed –> weeds (weed mean something else in English slang).”
What does weed mean in the U.S.? It means marijuana. According to Urban Dictionary, weed does not mean grass any more in the U.S.
So, be careful when you say weed. Now, my question is that what if you really mean one undesirable grass in your backyard. That is what a weed is, right? I can literally say, “I have this huge weed in my backyard.” Then, it can be understood by other people as a huge marijuana in my backyard. What word would you use to really mean a weed in your backyard? This is actually confusing and hard for me to catch and use properly.
Anyway, that groundhog really enjoys weeds in my backyard so that I think I do not need to buy a weed killer. 🙂
P.S: Is weed killer fine though? Shouldn’t that mean marijuana killer?
“weed does not mean grass anymore”
Actually, “grass” is another term for marijuana…
You gotta be kidding me. I give up.
Like.
“I have this huge weed in my backyard” means you have one weed. “I have a lot of weed in my backyard” means you have a lot of marijuana. If you want to say you have exactly one really large marijuana plant you could say the first sentence too, but people would probably not assume that meaning unless it made sense from the context. You would probably add the word plant to disambiguate.
English grammar sometimes distinguishes between countable and uncountable nouns. For example, you use “less” for uncountable things and “fewer” for countable ones: fewer lemons make less lemonade. In this case weeds is a countable plural noun (even though I have so many dandelions in my back yard right now that I cannot count them), whereas weed is either a singular noun (as in one dandelion plant) or a non-countable plural noun (smoking marijuana may make it more difficult to count things). So some people might be unhappy about having less weed but happy about having fewer weeds.
Hi Lorrie,
Good to see you here! Your explanation made things so much clearer. Especially,
Thank you and have a safe trip back!
Yeah, this was a good explanation. Way to be!