My point is that compares to tobacco and booze, both can also be very disgusting when used with poor habits, and can also cause just as many health issues, people seem to look down on betel nut users more.
Mind you, when you smoke tobacco, others get hurt from second hand smoke. When you drink irresponsibly and drive, others could get hurt from vehicular accidents. When you spit betel nut juice on the floor, the worst that happens is someone else has to clean it up.
HS, youâll probably know about this, isnât it also the case that indigenous Taiwanese traditionally grew their own tobacco and this practice was wiped out by the Taiwan tobacco monopoly, including actual arrests and prosecutions?
I would say it is like a mix between chewing tobacco (or smoking a cigarette) and having a strong coffee. Effects last 20 minutes at best. It wakes you up and can help you focus. It also can make blood rush to your head and feel very hot and sweaty.
Not really worth it in my opinion but I can see why the workers use it - primarily to stay awake.
Thatâs a good description of the effects. For me it also felt like a combo of chewing tobacco and strong coffee, providing a coffee-like pickup mixed with a hot flash and a little light-headedness. I also made the rookie mistake of swallowing the juice. Not a mistake I would make a second time.
Considering tobacco is only native to the Americas, and could only have been introduced by the Dutch or the Spanish at the earliest, while some tribes probably didnât get into the action until the Japanese.
We can sort of guess how early a word is borrowed by how much sound change occurred. Most of these are obviously loanwords from tobacco, however the ones with an /m/ instead of a /b/ in the second syllable probably were borrowed much earlier.
Those with a /b/ were probably Japanese loanwords, and the ones with an /m/ were probably Spanish or Dutch loanwords. Itâs worth noting most Pingpu aboriginals use the /m/ version. Finkes sounds like a borrow from the Dutch word for fingers, perhaps describing the shape of cigars, puqan sounds like a Holo loanword for pu-ian (ĺšç ).
So, for those who got tobacco from the Dutch or the Spanish, their 200 year old tradition of growing was cut short by the Japanese state monopoly.
Do you know why? You can not spit the juice on the street now, but very often they just throw their spit-cup they use on the road, making a huge mess. Plastic, juice, nuts, not a pretty sight!
Throwing out cigarette butts isnât nice either, but spit-cups is just disgusting.
There should be something about chewing that makes you feel different, why chew? So, itâs like driving after a beer or two?