Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Yo, wazup dawg!

I was intrigued by a recent perusal of the Urban Dictionary, which defines some of those weird words and phrases and street slang teenagers are supposed to use these days (although I am convinced most of them are apochryphal and unlikely to be encountered on ANY street let alone those of our middle class Toronto neighbourhood).
In addition to giving you the skinny on chavs and moshers, demonstrating the difference between phat and shibby, and the cultural significance of preps and snaking, there is also some fascinating insights into the way the language is adapting and mutating as we speak (example: 'ghey', meaning lame or weak, but supposedly attempting to take the homosexual meaning out of 'gay'), and some new words which are just too cute not to have been invented back in Anglo-Saxon times (such as noob, fark, guap, dap, etc).
It also includes user-contributed definitions of some more normal words and phrases. There is a lot of smut, some of it quite enjoyable smut admittedly, and many poorly-spelled and poorly-thought-out contributions, but some I found rather witty and provocative:
  • tattoo - dermatological graffiti
  • erotica - pornography with bad lighting
  • World War II - One of the few sequels that surpassed the original
  • crusade - a commerically successful action movie set near the end of the eleventh century
  • agnostic - an atheist who admits that he could be wrong, and thinks that this makes him something else
  • depression - the common rational reaction to self-awareness
  • wife - a prostitute with a life-long contract to a single client
  • hope - the delusion that your situation is not as objectively bad as it is
  • originality - the art of concealing your source
  • idiot - a person who occupies a position or opinion opposing your correct one

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