Urban Dictionary
Last year my cousin introduced me to this interesting website called Urban Dictionary and which, as one can learn on the homepage, is the “slang dictionary you wrote”.
What happens is that people submit a word or expression that they want to see in the Urban Dictionary. The result is quite often very imaginative and surprising, and as Adam O’Riordan of the guardian.co.uk puts it “Urban Dictionary might seem a frivolous place for a poet to go a-browsing. But it’s a brilliant window on English in transition.”
And I completely agree with him.
Myself a French native-speaker, I am often impressed by the versatility of the English language and when I see words such as shoulder-surfing, workahol or tag-hag, I cannot help but wonder at the magic of this parlance.
By pure coincidence, last May, I went to a comedy show at the Brighton Festival which happened to relate to the Urban Dictionary. The performer, Alex Horne, has been trying to invent his own word and successfully implant it in the English language, and even though “verbal gardening” (the act of planting the seeds of new terms) is not that easy in our modern and complex world, Alex has managed to spread his words in all the national newspapers, on Sky News, the Daily Politics Show and on BBC World. His creations pratdigger and tkday are therefore beginning to catch on and will perhaps make it into the prestigious Oxford English Dictionary.
Good luck to you Alex and in the meantime I invite you to surf the Urban Dictionary and maybe suggest your own word! Why not?
Which reminds me that I could submit one too. Let me explain. I live in a shared flat in Brighton with a Scotsman who always uses the word “Ta” to say “Thank you”. For some reason every time he says that the French word “taratata” springs to my mind. What it really means is “No way!” or “Count me out!” but I have decided that in English it should mean “You’re welcome”, so if someone says “Ta”, you reply “Ratata!”.
I think it flows really well and sounds great so I will submit it right now to the Urban Dictionary and see what happens. Fingers crossed!
Tags: Alex Horne, English slang, pratdigger, taratata, The Guardian, tkday, Urban Dictionary