Word salad

What are people talking about when they want to “bend the block” or “home from work” or tell you to “come correct?”
What’s “terrorist voting?” A “flojectile?” A “googleganger?” “Cuddlingus?”

Although these and tens of thousands of other words and phrases like them now permeate our everyday discourse — uttered mostly on Comedy Central, late-night TV or by the funniest person at the bar — does anyone actually know what  “fud,” “dfl,” barking spider” and “twitterpated” really mean?

Probably not, unless they’ve discovered the Urban Dictionary (urbandictionary.com), the online but still largely underground word list that since 1999 has revealed a world where people rely heavily on Wikipedia for  information (see “Wikidemia”), slack off even more than they spew expletives and racial epithets, drink alcohol and smoke pot (lots of pot), use exclamation points by the truckload and run around naked — save the rubber gloves, goggles and plastic wrap. It’s a place where ribald sexuality and bowel and bladder evacuation — often on one another — go hand-in-hand in relative importance with stuff that flies from your teeth while flossing (see “flojectiles”) and taking out the trash as a condition of having sex, or “choreplay” (also see “cuddlingus”).

To be sure, it’s equally funny and disgusting, only in an irresistibly hilarious and very democratic way, where visitors to the site are actual contributors and can then vote — if they can stop laughing long enough — on the propriety of any new word or phrase.

But while the Urban Dictionary makes a big point of allowing anything into the mix, no matter how controversial or potentially offensive, it is not alone in the growing online word creation business, with two of its main competitors — pseudodictionary.com and doubletounged.org —  going in a different, more academic direction. Nevertheless, more binds than separates the three. Writes Toby Lichtig in The Times (of London) Literary Supplement:

“UrbanDictionary 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 preemptively.

“In this sense,” Lichtig observed in a 2007 critique of yet another wordplay book, “Allen’s English Phrases,” by Robert Allen, “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.”

According to (what else?) Wikipedia, a PseudoDictionary user can submit a word for inclusion, giving a description and an example. But unlike Urban Dictionary and other sites for new words, the PseudoDictionary chooses to remain strictly “family friendly,” allowing “no swearing, no toilet humor and no racist, sexist, or offensive language.”

On the other hand, with a guy like Grant Barrett in charge, how could the Doubletongued Dictionary be anything but an engaging, albeit academic, exercise in advanced wordplay? Editor of “The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English,” co-host of “A Way With Words” at KPBS-FM in San Diego, vice president for communications and technology for the American Dialect Society, formerly project editor of the “Historical Dictionary of American Slang” and editor of the “Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang,” Barrett has a few rules of his own for submitting entries: 1. They must not already be included in mainstream dictionaries; 2. Words and phrases cannot be “coined, invented, or said for the first time ever by you, a friend, a family member, nor by someone else close to you”; 3. Words cannot be “part of an organized campaign to spread a word, to market a product, or to get a word in a dictionary”; 4. Entries cannot be the product of a “word-creation contest”; and 5. They cannot “seem to have been used more than once, ever.”

Doubletongued, writes Barrett on its site, “strives to record terms and expressions that are absent from, or are poorly covered in, mainstream dictionaries.” And he gets lots of help apparently, crediting Sarah Hilliard, James Martin, Tyson Burghardt, James Callan, Dianne Stevens, Adam Shuck, Matthew Hefferin and Nicole Fortuna with “hunting down” words and phrases for inclusion.

Aaron Peckham, the former Cal Poly San Luis Obispo student who founded Urban Dictionary 10 years ago and in 2006 wrote “Urban Dictionary: Fularious Street Slang Defined,” and 2007’s “’Mo Urban Dictionary: Ridonkulous Street Slang Defined,” clearly knows there is a serious side to all of this craziness, (or “craxiness,” as in extra crazy), only as a possible target in the Bush administration’s crusade against free speech.

Peckham, who lives in the Bay Area, is a tough guy to track down. He hasn’t got a listed phone number, and online requests for comment have gone unanswered. But Peckham has given some insight into why he developed Urban Dictionary.

“Urban Dictionary,” he wrote in a friend of the court brief in the ACLU’s successful fight against the Justice Department in ACLU v. [former Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales (originally ACLU v. Reno, then ACLU v. Ashcroft), “has always been about freedom of expression — the freedom to share your words and your meanings (and your humor) with the world.

“I’m participating in this lawsuit [the recently successful challenge to the Child Online Protection Act, or COPA, which mandated fines of up to $50,000 per day and up to six months imprisonment for sites presenting online material acknowledged as valuable for adults but judged “harmful to minors”] because I don’t see a reason to limit the expression of the site’s authors.

“Everyone deserves the opportunity to express themselves, and everyone deserves the opportunity to understand everyone else. Urban Dictionary tries to make that kind of understanding possible (and be funny at the same time). It’s a dictionary that reflects the real world because it gives people the freedom to define the world, in their terms,” Peckham wrote.

“Free speech and the Internet go hand in hand,” he concluded, “because online, anyone with a computer can be heard. The Internet equalizes people like that — no matter how much money you have, or how old you are, you can connect with a huge number of people. And it’s getting easier as computers become cheaper and easier to use. … Urban Dictionary evolved to what it is today because people used it for their own purpose — self-expression.”

Mean what you say
Just as not everything submitted to Doubletongue and PseudoDictionary gets published, many new entries fail to make the cut for Urban Dictionary, but not because of any traditional editing; it’s all done by voting.

“Flojectile,” for instance, or “the bits of food matter that fly onto your mirror while flossing your teeth,” didn’t make it, with 767 voting visitors saying yes and 1,448 giving it thumbs down. The same went for “craxy,” with the “x” signifying extra crazy, which was voted down by 667 yays to 2,570 nays.

“UDI,” or Unidentified Drinking Injury, however, was a big hit at a 2,955 to 325 spread. Maybe readers were swayed by the helpful examples that go along with each definition, in this case: “When one is drunk, one picks up random bruises, aches and pains. At worst, cuts and bruises too.” The sentence: “I am pretty sure I broke a finger playing cards last night. wtf.” Of course, “wtf” is Internet and Urban Dictionary slang for “what the fuck,” just as “fud” means “fear, uncertainty and doubt” and “dfl” means “dead fucking last.”

Politics is also seeping into the dictionary’s more than 400,000-entry lexicon. “Obamania,” for instance, or the national obsession last fall with President Barack Obama, was a wining entry by a 2,098 to 1,108 margin.

More recently, there’s “Pullin’ a Palin,” for Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s decision to quit office. Receiving 8,110 thumbs up and 2,761 thumbs down, the phrase means: “1. Quitting when the going gets tough; abandoning the responsibility entrusted to you by your neighbors for book advances and to make money on the lecture circuit. 2. Bizarre move that will damn ambitions for higher office.” The helpful sentence: “I bet when people saw Jade they were convinced that David Caruso was pullin’ a Palin.”

But then, just to bring it all back home, the next entry is “spank bank,” which is “1. A memorable collection of mental images that one wishes to retain for master debational purposes. 2. Porn collection.” No doubt the helpful sentence, “‘Yo, 2 o’clock, see that thong?’ ‘Yeah, that’s going in the spank bank,’” helped this term win hands, er, down with an overwhelming 2,287 to 198 favorability rating.

All of this drinking, swearing and cavorting probably best explains Urban Dictionary’s still virtually underground popularity. But even if only a few people have even really read the dictionary, folks other than frat boys have heard of a “Pasadena Mudslide,” or a “Walla Walla Sledgehammer,” or the “Texas Chili Bowl,” also known as “TCB.”

We won’t get into the Pasadena Mudslide, but do look it up if you have a strong stomach. And, OK, the “Walla Walla Sledgehammer,” which was first heard on E’s “The Soup,” doesn’t really mean anything yet, at least not according to Urban Dictionary. But there is a “Sledgehammer,” and there is a “Tennessee Sledgehammer” (when one hits someone as hard as they possibly can: “I'm about to have to give that dude the old Tennessee Sledgehammer”).

As for the “TCB,” Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park fame just made that up for one episode, and “the people” have pretty much adopted Parker and Stone’s definition (516 to 36), which is briefly described as a bowl of chili sauce in close proximity to a telephone receiver and an anus.

But it seems there has always been a “Pittsburgh Dump Truck” and a “Boston Pancake” — very messy and stinky things to some people (a few too many, let’s hope).

What is it that drives us to define everyday realities in such wildly clever but hugely offensive terms? Or for that matter, given America’s colorful and ever-evolving vernacular, are these culturally informed linguistic gymnastics really all that unusual for a country that constantly reinvents its own language, mainly because its citizens have spoken a mixture of too many tongues over the past three centuries to count accurately?

WFK (or who fucking knows)? But it sure is funny.

The last word
Unlike other online dictionary authors, Peckham is defined by his own readers in his own dictionary. And, judging by the following unedited stream of definitions, he is much beloved:

1.     WOW, i cant believe that no one has ever defined Aaron Peckham. He’s the dude that created this website. Aaron Peckham was a computer science student in 1999 when he launched a Web site to compare urban slang used by university students in different parts of California. Dude, Aaron Peckham is the man!

2.     The Godfather of Urban Dictionary If I knew Aaron Peckham, I’d most likely tap, regardless of sex, race or ethnicity.

3.     The legend who created Urban Dictionary back in ’01. Aaron Peckham is the fucking man.

With a an adoring audience like that, can Peckham’s next book on American slang be that far off?