Lowbrow Language

 

The internet has made dictionaries more accessible to all globally. However, the online dictionaries clearly vary in credibility. Rather than classifying them merely as credible versus doubtful, highbrow and lowbrow, it might be better to place them on a fluid spectrum, with Urban Dictionary, one of the crowd-sourced ones, being apparently the least edited (if not completely unedited), at the bottom of the heap. This dictionary seems to use “moderators” who vote on whether to include a suggested entry, rather than availing itself of lexicographers or proper editors. The moderators do not correct spelling, grammar, or wording. In an article entitled “How Linguists Are Using Urban Dictionary”, Christine Ro of JSTOR Daily has in fact described Urban Dictionary as “a linguistic sewer” since it allows audacious contributors to coin and add terms in a way one would not normally do in a formal context. The writer states that “Urban Dictionary continues a long history of recording low-brow language. It’s also a repository of a specific kind of internet immaturity.” It seems that anyone can add to it, with little resistance or quality control, unlike other crowd-sourced dictionaries such as Wiktionary, which employs lexicographers. Urban Dictionary’s style is somewhat vulgar in places, with new expressions, and new senses to existing expressions, constantly being coined. Grammar errors abound. Though Urban Dictionary was started by a Computer Science student in 1999 to parody Dictionary.com, it has grown to attract tens of millions of visitors per month according to Ro. Would one recommend Urban Dictionary to most students? Not really, though they should know that it exists. Exceptions as to whom it may concern would be, for example, students of linguistics.

Slang dictionaries are not new to the English language, having for centuries clued readers on the language of marginalized people such as criminals. Still, Urban Dictionary appears to be an extreme case, prompting language purists to consider the site as a major source of corruption of the English language, with a “bias toward obnoxiousness” as Ro put it. In fact, the writer wonders whether the contributors are not “just pranking would-be scholars” using the site for entertainment. In the end she admits that linguists are carefully studying Urban Dictionary to “track, date, and analyze” language regardless of how vulgar or audience-specific it may be. She cites internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch’s book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language: “IBM experimented with adding Urban Dictionary data to its artificial intelligence system Watson, only to scrub it all out again when the computer started swearing at them.” Trash in, trash out! That was around a decade ago. More recently, researchers have capitalized on the sarcasm of the dictionary for training AI in sarcasm detection, as cited by Wilson et. al. in “Urban Dictionary Embeddings for Slang NLP Applications.”

Urban Dictionary’s blog provides updates on how the dictionary is evolving. For example, the moderators can no longer accept entries simply because they like them; their job is to check them against a set of guidelines that were introduced in 2021. The guidelines encourage linguistic creativity but clarify that while offensive entries are allowed (because they exist in society), such entries must not target individuals or encourage harassment, discrimination, or violence against others. The dictionary had been criticized in the past for allowing racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and sexism. For instance, Jason Parham, writing for Wired magazine in 2019 had commented that “The crowdsourced dictionary once felt like a pioneering tool of the early internet era. Now in its 20th year, it has become something much more inhospitable.”

Studying this form of slang is one thing, but using it would be a different ball game altogether.