I was trolling a friend’s post on a social media site I fondly call “Crackbook,” when I encountered an unfamiliar word. I suspected that the word was not intended to be complimentary, but my traditional reference sources failed me. I then googled it and Urban Dictionary added another word to the basket of pejoratives commonly aimed at people who look like me. (Tall, fashionable glasses-wearing men.)
The next day, I read an article in the Not The Weekly View about how the Urban Dictionary has become important to the courts as an aid in defining slang and vulgarities. My regular reader knows that I am a fan of words. My spats with my British friend about the use of English notwithstanding, (he says we speak “American”) I know that the language evolves. I accept that and welcome the riches. But sometimes, things go sideways.
In Philip Roth’s novel, The Human Stain, Coleman Silk’s life as an academic is undone when he uses a word to describe two students he had not seen. The word has multiple definitions and applications, one of which was pejorative, and the pejorative is the definition that won out. We have plenty of deprecatory words, and obviously, more than I knew before my social media adventure. But it made me sad to realize that so much time is devoted to developing language that denigrates. But my sadness was partly ameliorated when I found out that a 19 year-old college freshman with a laptop could create something as dynamic as an Urban Dictionary from his dorm room.
When I googled the unfamiliar word I had encountered on my friends’ social media page, Urban Dictionary was one of the first sources that popped up. I have relied on the source before, but the article in that other publication made me realize that my reliance was on something I had not properly vetted.
Aaron Peckham started Urban Dictionary in 1999 as a parody. He and his friends would “sit around and make up words.” But as the Internet grew, more people started submitting words and definitions. About 30,000 definitions are proposed each month; if at least five other site members vote for it, the definition is added. That low threshold might miff some traditionalists, but it helps the courts. There has been an increasing reliance on the Internet and “crowd-sourced” Web sites as courts encounter “street” terms.
Urban Dictionary could have saved me some embarrassment a few years ago. I was telling my eldest daughter that I liked a popular song and loved to sing it at work. She found this hilarious for two reasons: I do not like rap, in general, and I had no idea of the definition of one of the most prominent terms used in the song. When she told me what I was singing, it helped to explain the sudden eruptions of geysers of coffee through the noses of my younger co-workers when I belted out the song.
The crowd-sourcing of Urban Dictionary, like Wikipedia, may not meet the needs of the academic, but it is helpful for those who want to know how words are used in the vernacular. When I used to travel to High Point, North Carolina, I heard a version of English that was as foreign to me as Farsi. Urban Dictionary would have come in handy then.
I’m not likely to give up my New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (two volumes and a CD) in favor of something like Urban Dictionary, but just as it grieves me to find another nasty-bomb word, it pleases me to have a way to get its definition.