The hope was to identify the rich, varied characteristics of a given language: be it speech patterns, specific terminology, or the lifespan of shared vocabulary. For a time, field studies went on like this. Similar to Wikipedia and Genius, Urban Dictionary inverted that approach through crowdsourcing: the people came to it.
Today, I don't think it's the right thing to try to remove offensive words. One regular defense he lobbed at critics was that the site, and its cornucopia of definitions, was not meant to be taken at face value.
Its goodness and its nastiness, instead, were a snapshot of a collective outlook. If anything, Peckham said, Urban Dictionary tapped into the pulse of our thinking. But if the radiant array of terminology uploaded to the site was initially meant to function as a possibility of human speech, it is now mostly a repository of vile language. In its current form, Urban Dictionary is a cauldron of explanatory excess and raw prejudice.
Luckily, like language, the internet is stubbornly resistant to stasis. It is constantly reconfiguring and building anew. Today, other digital portals—Twitter, Instagram, gossip blogs like Bossip and The Shade Room , even group texts on our smartphones—function as better incubators of language than Urban Dictionary.
Consider how Bossip's headline mastery functions as a direct extension of black style—which is to say the site embraces, head on, the syntax and niche vernacular of a small community of people.
The endeavor is both an acknowledgement of and a lifeline to a facet of black identity. That's not to say Urban Dictionary is vacant any good, but its utility, as a window into different communities and local subcultures, as a tool that extends sharp and luminous insight, has been obscured by darker intentions. What began as a joke is no longer funny. Even those who operate on the site understand it for what it's eroded into.
The top definition for Urban Dictionary reads: "Supposed to [b]e a user-inputed dictionary for words. However, has become a mindless forum of jokes, view-points, sex, and basically anything but the real definition of a word. Only the republic eventually ate itself.
Before joining the publication in , he was an editor at The Fader and Gawker. Yet Urban Dictionary has become much more than a parody site, drawing approximately 65 million visitors every month. Of course, Urban Dictionary is also a repository of adolescent grossout humor, often humor about sexual practices that are the stuff of urban legends uh, penis McFlurry?
Bigoted words and definitions have thrived on the site, but Peckham believes that offensive words should be left intact. With its crowdsourced definitions and high speed of coinage, Urban Dictionary is very much a product of the internet age. But it also continues a long history of recording low-brow language: dictionaries of English slang have been around in some form for centuries. The slang dictionaries of the seventeenth century were considered useful for clueing readers into the language of thieves and cheats , which itself was part of an older tradition of exoticizing the language of the poor and criminal.
Urban Dictionary carries this legacy forward, and the site is likely to persist in some form. The Library of Congress now archives it. Its pages were saved to the Internet Archive more than 12, times between May 25, , and October 4, , with a steady increase over time. Privacy Policy Contact Us You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message.
The stakes are increasing as well. Urban Dictionary is being used to determine the acceptability of vanity plate names in some U. More serious is the continued tradition of dictionary use in legal cases , where the interpretation of a single word can have grave consequences.
Whatever we might think of its vulgarity, Urban Dictionary is useful. It allows researchers to track terms that are too recent or too niche to appear in establishment dictionaries, and to determine how people are using English online. For example, one paper by communication expert Jean E. John: Hi Where were you? How much is the fish. What time is it. Mike , how much is the fish?
Very nice, how much? A reference to the popular film 'Borat, in which he implies an average woman walking past is a prostitute. Used in jest amongst friends, or as flirtation.
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