haters abound today

Dear urbandictionary.com,

You are the benevolent curators of a wealth of regional, in-group culture; you are cultural diffusion’s best friend. I deeply respect your project and have been reading your Urban Word of the Day emails for more than a year. Every one of them is forever preserved by my gmail account. I have cumulatively paid you hours of attention reading them.

That said, I must bitch. A full half of your Words of the Day are bad, sterile puns whose meanings are obvious—that is to say, there was no need for them in the dictionary and definitely no need to bring them to our attention. Let me give you some examples: typeractive, pregret, cafe diem, pottermania, technolust, United Statians, iPerbole, workahol, spring broke, brohemian.

These are lame plays on extant slang whose existence—I can only guess—is owed to some adolescent desire to “create” a new word or phrase. Slang is what happens when a subculture accepts a word or phrase as having idiosyncratic descriptive power—of them, by them, and for them. These words appear to be the work of some solitary punnist with all the wit of a financial advisor. They aren’t shorthand, they have no utility—they’re bad jokes told by unfunny people—they’re too precious to breathe—they are, to use your most recent word, awfully god damned twee. Twee, by the way, isn’t even slang.

It all flies in the face of what I understand your mission to be: to provide a home for slang, which by definition cannot be immediately understood. At your best, you bring to your readers the condensate of life itself, some diamond of culture from the daily grind coal mine. It’s wonderful. I was delighted to learn what truthiness was, to know who lives the pura vida—hell, my car just got out of the shop and I’m thinking of taking it for a ghost ride.

I don’t understand how you can be so inconsistent. How could you put “workahol” on par with gaslighting—or disco napping?

Yours,
Jesse