The origin of an Idiom

Saurav Chakravorty
Today’s Random
Published in
1 min readFeb 22, 2021

Humans and language co-evolve. A common slang in India is “charsoobees” or “four twenty”. A “four twenty” is someone who cheats. Indian languages derive this term from the Indian penal code setup by Britishers in India in 1860. The section 420 of the IPC deals with cheating.

Section 420 of Indian Penal Code, 1960 (https://www.indiacode.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/4219/1/THE-INDIAN-PENAL-CODE-1860.pdf)

The legal term became so common in the next 95 years that the highest grossing movie of 1955 was titled “Shree 420”.

In another part of the world, 420 (four twenty) became the code for smoking weed. That story is better read at HuffPost.

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Saurav Chakravorty
Today’s Random

I am a data scientist solving some interesting problems in the industry.