On this 20th day of the fourth month, it seemed appropriate to ponder the meaning and derivation of the number “420”. You can’t spend more than a day around a ski hill, bike park, or college without hearing it; indeed, last time I checked, Jackson Hole’s Village Cafe was located at the fictional address of 420 Teton Village Drive. Anyway, it’s likely that anyone born since the ’60s, which probably means most everyone reading this, has a more than passing familiarity with the stoner slang, but I learned long ago not to assume. So I dug a little deeper and in my search for meaning and origin I also learned that an etymologist named Marina Orlova has already done the work for us.

Orlova runs a website called Hot for Words, and, judging by the number of views her videos attract on YouTube (177 million video views, 192,000 subscribers), I’m apparently the last person on the planet, or last man anyway, to discover it. With no small amount of cleavage, this philologist offers up a new word every day, then hunts down the origin and shares it with eager followers. Why I didn’t think of this, I don’t know. What a waste, all those years I spent on the copy desk, arguing over semicolons with six other language geeks, when we could have stuffed the subject in a bikini and attracted millions. Well, god love her for doing what No Child Left Behind apparently couldn’t.

In any event, Orlova has offered a lesson on the derivation of 420 in two parts—the first offers a little quiz on the roots of the term, the second offers the answer. Check it out.