As someone whose mother tongue isn't English, I find the Urban Dictionary incredibly useful sometimes. It's sad sad it is blocked in virtually any corporate network.
I am not saying it doesn't happen, but why would it be blocked? Preventing hate speech in company culture? Is anyone thinking UD would be a go to place for finding a cool way to insult someone?
>but why would it be blocked? Preventing hate speech in company culture?
I suspect it is more about legal exposure, rather than thinking someone is going to come up with a new insult. For example, I suspect you can imagine some words that even being seen on a device in your company would end up in a civil lawsuit settlement.
It's blocked because it costs nothing, it incurs less risk than not blocking it, and nobody cares - corporate IT is extremely busy, overworked, trying to keep up with essential, high value tasks that impact the bottom line.
More immediately, probably it's blocked because it's on some blocklist. It's on the blocklist for the same reason: Why not? Consider these scenarios:
1. You're the IT manager. It's not blocked and something on UD causes a problem - content, even malware. You may think it's valid or not, but regardless HR, legal, managers, some VP, multiple employees, IT are all dealing with it. The VP asks you: I am extremely busy doing high-return work for the company and so are all these other people, and now I and all of these people are wasting time on this useless nonsense. Why didn't you block it? Isn't this your job? - What do you respond?
2. It's blocked, you work there and want to lookup something on UD, and you ask IT to unblock it. IT manager forwards the request to your manager, noting that IT staff are very busy integrating the new acquisition, but would be happy to do whatever your people need for important projects. Your manager asks you why you contacted IT. What is your response?
3. It's blocked, you want to lookup something on UD, and you complain to your manager that it's blocked. Your manager says: If you can't find something profitable to do, you're fired. If you can't figure out to use your phone, you're fired. Do you go over your manager's head?
4. It's blocked, you work in IT and go through the blocklist - probably tens of thousands of items long - and unblock some things like UD. Your manager says (the same as #3). What do you think?
5. It's blocked and you bring up at a meeting that you think it should be unblocked. Nobody speaks. Why are they silent?
You are there to achieve the organization's goals. UD has nothing at all to do with that or anything else of enough importance or value to even distract a co-worker for a half-second, causing them to refocus twice.
Nice answer, but I can counter: I'm high performing, doing high impact work. For some reason I need to analyse user reviews that use slang. I can't look it up because UD is blocked. Insanity. Maybe our hot new product is suddenly in the crossfire of some meme war. Eg. kids doing weird stuff on tiktok. Can't look it up. There are examples with companies going into fiascos because they publicly respond out of touch or awkwardly to event on social media. Opposite is that viral twitter account of wendy's. Do they have UD blocked?
Exactly, it often just
gives the right clue. For native speakers connotation is often trivial, but for us it's difficult and a source that almost grotesquely exaggerates is perfect for picking up that.
It used to be pretty good but the last three or four times I’ve tried to look something up I’ve not found anything that fits the usage I’ve seen, and most or all entries are clearly someone trying to “make fetch happen” (promote some definition their friend circle used for a week then dropped) or making a “joke” (just spam).
this looks to be a book about historical slang, whereas a modern slang reference probably is Urbandictionary.com... it looks like most of the words referenced in this catalog are not commonly used today
It was fun to just thumb through it and find bizarre old phrases like "cat's pyjamas."
Cool to see an open and digitized version of something similar, especially something better than urbandictionary, which can be useful, but also has a lot of repeat entries and a stupid ability to downvote correct entries.
What would be a programmatic approach to find a list of most rarely used words (in any language?).
I'm thinking, loop a list of words from a dictionary, and see how many results a search engine would return (filtering out dictionary results) - it would take a while - most languages have some hundred thousand words.
There are various tools that professionals use to analyze this question. Google Books' Ngrams data seems to be popular.
Here's a paper whose methodology addresses some of your question:
Jean-Baptiste Michel et al. Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books. Science 331, 176-182 (2011). DOI:10.1126/science.1199644
Maybe download an archive of Wikipedia articles and build a word occurrence dictionary out of that to compare? It would be much faster than a ton of separate search queries
The top post on that subreddit is hilarious:
"[Chinese] 報復性熬夜 (revenge bedtime procrastination) - a phenomenon in which people who don’t have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late night hours"
If the word of the week is "act up", I'm not enticed to think this is a more useful or detailed reference source than Urban Dictionary, or, you know, a dictionary.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang is the largest historical dictionary of English slang. Written by Jonathon Green over 17 years from 1993, it reached the printed page in 2010 in a three-volume set containing nearly 100,000 entries supported by over 400,000 citations from c. ad 1000 to the present day. The main focus of the dictionary is the coverage of over 500 years of slang from c. 1500 onwards.
The printed version of the dictionary received the Dartmouth Medal for outstanding works of reference from the American Library Association in 2012; fellow recipients include the Dictionary of American Regional English, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. It has been hailed by the American New York Times as ‘the pièce de résistance of English slang studies’ and by the British Sunday Times as ‘a stupendous achievement, in range, meticulous scholarship, and not least entertainment value’.
On this website the dictionary is now available in updated online form for the first time, complete with advanced search tools enabling search by definition and history, and an expanded bibliography of slang sources from the early modern period to the present day. Since the print edition, nearly 60,000 quotations have been added, supporting 5,000 new senses in 2,500 new entries and sub-entries, of which around half are new slang terms from the last five years.
