What was needed was an official archive for those evolving styles of communication. So he developed a version that ascribed to a less exclusionary tone: local and popular slang, or what linguist Gretchen McCulloch might refer to as "public, informal, unselfconscious language" now had a proper home.
In time, however, the site began to espouse the worst of the internet—Urban Dictionary became something much uglier than perhaps what Peckham set out to create. It transformed into a harbor for hate speech. By allowing anyone to post definitions users can up or down vote their favorite ones Peckham opened the door for the most insidious among us. Racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and sexism currently serve as the basis for some of the most popular definitions on the site.
In fact, one of the site's definitions for sexism details it as "a way of life like welfare for black people. When I first discovered Urban Dictionary around , I considered it a public good. The internet still carried an air of innocence then; the lion's share of people who roamed chat forums and posted on LiveJournal had yet to adopt the mob instincts of cancel culture ; Twitter was years away from warping our consumption habits and Facebook was only a fraction of the giant it is today.
I was relatively new to what the internet could offer—its infinite landscapes dazzled my curious teenage mind—and found a strange solace in Urban Dictionary.
My understanding of it hewed to a simple logic. Here was a place where words and phrases that friends, cousins, neighbors, and people I knew used with regularity found resonance and meaning. Before Urban Dictionary, I'd never seen words like hella or jawn defined anywhere other than in conversation.
That they were afforded a kind of linguistic reverence was what awed me, what drew me in. The site, it then seemed, was an oasis for all varieties of slang, text speak, and cultural idioms. Later, as black culture became the principal vortex for which popular culture mined cool, intra-communal expressions like bae , on fleek , and turnt , were increasingly the property of the wider public.
It was a place where entry into the arena did not require language to adhere to the rules of proper grammar. As Mary B. Urban Dictionary's abandonment of that edict afforded it a rebel spirit. Early on, the beauty of the site was its deep insistence on showing how slang is socialized based on a range of factors: community, school, work.
How we casually convey meaning is a direct reflection of our geography, our networks, our worldviews. JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. By: Christine Ro. November 13, December 16, Share Tweet Email Print. Have a correction or comment about this article?
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