Even though I spend most of my time looking at slang words in the past, I get carried away very easily by readings about language-related stuff in general (I can't help being a linguist and a language lover). The other day, I found myself checking
Urban Dictionary when I was searching for some metalinguistic comments on present-day slang. I typed in 'slang' as a keyword search as I was curious about how Urban Dictionary users would define slang. These are the top 3 results, which were ranked according to most 'thumbs up':
1. The only reason Urbandictionary.com exists.
2. The ever-evolving bastardization of the written and spoken language as a result of social and cultural idolization of uneducated, unitelligable celebrities.
3. Slang is the continual and ever-changing use and definition of words in informal conversation, often using references as a means of comparison or showing likeness. Some modern slang has endured over the decades since its inception (i.e. cool) and some will only last a few years before being rendered obsolete or outdated (i.e. bling bling). Slang can be born from any number of situations or ideas (the word slang itself has come to represent selling, especially of illegal drugs), and can be blunt or riddled with metaphor, and often quite profound.
I was quite amused by the first comment. Thinking more deeply about it, Urban Dictionary is without doubt one of the most interesting and valuable resources on 21st-century slang. The most frustrating thing for historical linguists is that they do not have direct access to the spoken language of the past. We can only rely on what's been recorded in written documents, but we are always faced with the question of authencity: How truthful is the written word to the spoken discourse? In general, written and oral language don't seem to resemble each other at all. For example, spoken discourse is fragmented, whereas written discourse is careful planned. But to go back to the value of Urban Dictionary as a resource, what makes this online dictionary unique is that, as they declare on their homepage: It's is the dictionary
you wrote (you being the language user).
The emphasis is not mine. Like Wikipedia, it's the user who writes and decides the content, which leads to wonderful and insightful comments such as (2) and (3). Also, all word entries are dated and example sentences in which the term is used are provided. This kind of contextual information is hardly found in eighteenth-century slang dictionaries. And as long as the WWW remains to exist, chances are little that this information will disappear very easily. Future linguists should be very pleased.
