The University of Idaho Argonaut

A glorious steaming pile of Internet dung greeted me as I logged on to my Facebook account for the first time in two and a half weeks, and no, it wasn’t the millionth change to its user interface.

“Type your first name into Urban Dictionary and repost what it says,” started an innocent post by a friend of mine.
The innocence was quickly lost.

“Kevin: basically a kid with a huge...” Well, I will let you complete the sentence.

This somewhat disturbing trend has been making the rounds on Facebook for the past few weeks, bringing back terrible high school memories of those “101 things about me” quizzes, which pre-pubescent teens filled out in droves.

At first glance, I counted 12 of my friends who had done this little name lookup, and their posts ranged from the mildly-informative — “Paul: a common given name for males, derived from the Roman surname Paulus,” to middle-of-the-line slutty — “Alisha: a hot curvaceous female,” to the sexually obscene — “Brad: is known to be the ultimate sex machine.”

Having never heard of Urban Dictionary, I proceeded to ask an acquaintance about it and got a five-minute lecture on how it is the greatest Web site in the world, full of information you will never find anywhere else.

Turns out her ramblings, however misguided, have merit. Urban Dictionary, which was founded in 1999 by a computer science student at Cal Poly, averages over 15 million viewers a month and has over four million definitions. These range from the entertaining and deviously hard to spell, like ‘snowpocalypse,’ to the downright crude, such as ‘dinner whore.’

To my horror, I have found people who spend hours on this Web site surfing random entries, creating new ones and sharing useless definitions with others. Our species developed the Internet for unlimited access to knowledge and understanding, changing the way we learn about our world ... and this is how many of our youth use it.

My friend tells me surfing Urban Dictionary “increases her urban knowledge.” Personally, I have never had someone come up to me and ask if I have ever found myself in a ‘Mondaze,’ which, by the way, means a daze you find yourself in due to it being Monday, and I pray to God I am not alone.

And people wonder why children these days are so illiterate.

Urban Dictionary, it seems, never skips a beat — one entry simply reads, “Urbanism: The Religion based on the Holy book of the Urban Dictionary.”

Join hands, my fellow educated masses, for today we see our society scrape that much lower to the bottom of the cesspool.

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	1. 27-02-2010 13:35
	"Prig" defined From the URBAN DICTIONARY:    prig: "One who demonstrates smugness at conforming to conservative ideals. Often deriding elements of modernity and change simply because it is outside of the absolutist parameters by which the prig views his surroundings. The prig elevates the artificial constructs of established rules to the point where deviation from these fabrications will be judged as "good" or "bad." Even on superficial matters." Registered

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