purple heart
See also: Purple Heart and purpleheart
Englisch
editEtymology
editFrom the color of the pills.
Nomen
editpurple heart (plural purple hearts)
- The drug phenobarbitone when taken recreationally.
- (slang, historical) A drinamyl tablet when taken recreationally, popular in the 1960s.
- 1963 March 27, “Drug pills eaten like sweets, says detective”, in The Guardian[1]:
- Detective Peter Goodall said the source of the tablets had not been traced. "Purple heart" or drinamyl tablets, were a stimulant drug and habit-forming.
- 1972, Ray Davies (lyrics and music), “Big Black Smoke”, performed by The Kinks:
- And every penny she had / Was spent on purple hearts and cigarettes
- 2012, Pete Townshend, Who I Am, HarperCollins, →ISBN, page 245:
- We were all coming down from taking purple hearts, the fashionable uppers of the period.
Further reading
edit- “purple hearts n.”, in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon Green, 2016–present