Behold your future, Cavendish the Younger. You will not apply for membership, but the tribe of the elderly will claim you. Your present will not keep pace with the world's. This slippage will stretch your skin, sag your skeleton, erode your hair and memory, make your skin turn opaque so your twitching organs and blue-cheese veins will be semi-visible. You will venture out only in daylight, avoiding weekends and school holidays. Language, too, will leave you behind, betraying your tribal affiliations whenever you speak. On escalators, on trunk roads, in supermarket aisles, the living will overtake you, incessantly. Elegant women will not see you. Store detectives will not see you. Salespeople will not see you, unless they sell stair-lifts or fraudulent insurance policies. Only babies, cats and drug addicts will acknowledge your existence. So do not fritter away your days. Sooner than you fear, you will stand before a mirror in a care home, look at your body, and think, ET, locked in a ruddy cupboard for a fortnight.
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, pp. 182-183
In a recent TLS review (June 30, 2006), Jonathan Hope boldly declared: “I have seen the future of slang dictionaries, and its name is UrbanDictionary.com”. In some ways, Hope was right. UrbanDictionary.com and its Web 2.0 contemporaries, such as PseudoDictionary and Doubletongued, offer a relentlessly expanding, up-to-the-minute lowdown on current speech in a way that is impossible to match. As soon as an expression appears and the moment it morphs, it is recorded on these sites – often pre-emptively. In this sense, the very idea of the dictionary has been turned on its head; idiom is no longer included on the grounds of its maturity, but rather registered in the hope that it will one day enter the language. Dictionaries have always been prescriptive; but here we have a history before the event.
It is to UrbanDictionary.com that we now turn for clarification on contemporary phenomena – for information on the cult of “brapping”, for instance, (celebrating or endorsing something by imitating a gunshot noise) or the playground term “allow that” (which roughly translates as “I disagree/am displeased that”). At UrbanDictionary.com, we can identify the “drunk dial” (which also applies to texting – “One drunk-dials to emote, excoriate, declare, confide, or proposition, often at a grossly inappropriate hour”), or the art of being “the bombdotcom” (very good indeed). One can read about irritations such as “carriage cruisers” (“A person who is unable to simply stand in one position on a train and decides . . . to move down the length of the train using the internal doors”) and the “Yoko factor” (“A term used to refer to something that splits up a group of friends”). UrbanDictionary.com is useful; it can be inventive (“slurk” – “a mixture of lurk and sneak”) and funny (“I beg to differ” – “I want to sleep with you”); but, as with so much of Web 2.0, there is more chaff than wheat. As well as being entertaining, it is repetitive; and though its content ranges from celebrities to frisbees to food, most of the entries are predictably about sex and will almost certainly prove to be ephemeral.
Toby Lichtig, Times Literary Supplement, February 9 2007. Full text at TLS website.