Urban Dictionary: The best place to watch language evolve
Urban Dictionary might seem a frivolous place for a poet to go a-browsing. But it's a brilliant window on English in transition
In just over an hour online I have learned 20 new words (or more properly neologisms). I have learned that to remove a friend on Facebook, is to "deface", that "thumb me" is to ask someone to send you a text message, and that "veepstakes" are "the process a candidate for president goes through to choose a running mate … a portmanteau word combining the colloquial pronunciation of VP as "veep" and sweepstakes".
For the third time in a week I am on urbandictionary.com, and haunted by the feeling that this is not quite what my time as poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust should be spent doing. Isn't this simply a transatlantic, online version of Viz's famous Profanisaurus? Well, no, it isn't really.
In just over an hour online I have learned 20 new words (or more properly neologisms). I have learned that to remove a friend on Facebook, is to "deface", that "thumb me" is to ask someone to send you a text message, and that "veepstakes" are "the process a candidate for president goes through to choose a running mate … a portmanteau word combining the colloquial pronunciation of VP as "veep" and sweepstakes".
For the third time in a week I am on urbandictionary.com, and haunted by the feeling that this is not quite what my time as poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust should be spent doing. Isn't this simply a transatlantic, online version of Viz's famous Profanisaurus? Well, no, it isn't really.
posted by temporal at 9/26/2008
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