Words are living things

A word is not a stone.
It is a living thing.

It is born somewhere: in a mouth, a street, a port, a book, a prison, a laboratory, a market, a joke, a mistake. Then it travels. If people need it, it survives. If they repeat it long enough, it may change status. What began as error may become usage. What began as slang may become dictionary. What began as insult may become identity. What began as science may become cliché.

Language does not ask permission before changing.

That does not mean everything is correct.
It means correctness itself has a history.

Marijuana did not begin as a neutral scientific word. In the United States, it was pushed through law, newspapers and policing with racial and political weight attached to it. Yet the word survived, changed markets, entered legal texts, became common speech and still carries different meanings depending on who says it and where.

Hemp is another example. Botanically, it is not a separate moral plant from cannabis. But law, industry and public language treated it as a different social object: fibre, seed, rope, food, policy, “safe cannabis”. The word became a gate.

The plant did not change first. The language did.

A mistake that survives long enough may stop being a mistake and become a language event.

The dictionary arrives late.
The street has already voted.