Tired of Streaming? Free Blockbuster Libraries Offer an Alternative.

 

The neighborhood lending libraries have popped up around North America, offering a nostalgic return to DVDs.

A Free Blockbuster kiosk in an old newspaper box, on a sidewalk in Los Angeles. Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times

By Livia Albeck-Ripka and Aimee Ortiz

Livia Albeck-Ripka reported from Hollywood and other parts of Los Angeles, and Aimee Ortiz from New York.

Streaming services have transformed the way we view film and television, leaving us isolated on our couches, subject to the suggestions of an algorithm. But a small group of film buffs with a fondness for physical media are hoping to lure people back into the real world — one abandoned newspaper box at a time.

The Free Blockbuster project began in 2019, when Brian Morrison, a film and television producer in Los Angeles, and a former Blockbuster employee, painted the company’s blue-and-yellow logo onto an old box and filled it with DVDs. For many, the brand evokes memories of the trip to the video store with friends or family to browse the shelves and to pick up a film and a bag of popcorn.

“There’s a nostalgia attached to it that is resonant for a whole generation,” he said of the nearly obsolete Blockbuster chain, which operated thousands of video rental stores worldwide at its peak in the early 2000s. “It means something to a lot of people.”

The Free Blockbuster movement slowly gained traction and eventually, more than 200 other community boxes had opened from Louisiana to Canada and even Britain — though it is unclear how many remain operational.

“We are social animals; we want to go out into the world and engage with each other,” said Mr. Morrison, who keeps a lending library outside his home. He often refills it with DVDs and VHS tapes including TV series, horror movies and, on occasion, signed independent films, and said that it had encouraged interaction with his neighbors.

Andrew Kevin Walker, a Los Angeles-based screenwriter, said he had visited secondhand stores especially to seek out films to leave in the boxes — including two sealed James Bond box sets and a copy of “Cobra,” a 1986 film written by Sylvester Stallone. “It’s an opportunity for people to really share their love of cinema, whether it be their favorite guilty pleasure, or their favorite movie of all time,” he said.

Viewers with streaming fatigue say they are tired of chasing content that moves around an ever-expanding array of platforms or even disappears altogether, and some long for the physical media that was dominant until streaming took over.

Alyssa Kollgaard’s Free Blockbuster in Sun Valley, Calif., holds DVDs in a box painted the same blue and yellow as the famed movie rental store chain. Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times

A selection of DVDs and VHS tapes including Disney movies and “Basic Instinct” provide nostalgia at a Free Blockbuster location in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times

“I think it’s great that folks are doing this — keeping the spirit of DVDs alive, circulating film in and exchanging them,” said Joe Pichirallo, a film producer and professor at New York University.

Shortly after Free Blockbuster was launched, a lawyer for DISH Network, which now owns the Blockbuster brand, sent Mr. Morrison a letter asking he stop using the company’s logo and name.

A spokeswoman for DISH did not respond to questions about the letter, but said in an email that the company was “aware” of the Free Blockbuster initiative. “DISH continues to explore and evaluate different opportunities that would best fit the iconic brand,” she said.

Blockbuster opened in Dallas in 1985 and by 2004 had grown to more than 9,000 stores around the world. In 2000, the company turned down an offer to buy Netflix, now worth about $265 billion, for $50 million.

Last year, Netflix ended its DVD service, and Best Buy recently announced it would stop selling discs. Physical media can still be borrowed from most public libraries.

“Consumers have found it much more convenient to watch something where, when and whenever they want,” Professor Pichirallo said.

The award-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay called the recently renewed interest in DVDs vital and refreshing. “It is something that I very much embrace,” she said in a phone interview.

When it comes to art, “nothing beats holding it in your hand,” Ms. DuVernay said.

“That tactile intimacy of touch is something that sounds kind of flighty and unimportant, but touch is a sense,” she said. “It is a part of the experience of consuming and experiencing art.”

Ms. DuVernay lamented the loss of the director’s cuts and commentary that often came with DVDs but are now largely absent from films on streaming services. “That’s how I actually learned to make content,” she said. “I picked up a camera when I was 32, I listened to directors talk about their films to the picture.”

As Free Blockbusters have opened across the country, the last Blockbuster in Bend, Ore., continues to rent out films on DVD and Blu-ray. But Sandi Harding, who has managed the store for the past two decades, doesn’t see them in competition: The more people who engage with the Blockbuster brand and physical media the better, she said.

The store, which became the last in the world after franchises in Alaska and Australia closed their doors, now largely draws summer tourists, in addition to some regular customers, said Ms. Harding, noting that about 80 percent of the store’s income now comes from merchandise, and the remainder from film rentals. But it became increasingly challenging to scope out new releases on DVD and Blu-ray online, or at local department stores, she said.

“I don’t think it’ll ever go back to where it was before. But I think it’s kind of like vinyl records,” which have resurged, she said.

Alfonso Castillo, who co-founded a Free Blockbuster on Long Island with his son, said the lending library sees regular turnover with people both taking and dropping off movies, including older people. “My sense is that for them, it’s less of this cool novelty sort of ironic thing and more like, finally, there’s a place to get DVDs again,” he said.

Alyssa Kollgaard stands next to her suburban Free Blockbuster in Sun Valley, Calif. Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times

At a Free Blockbuster in Sun Valley, Calif., customers have included an Amazon driver, passers-by on horseback and those who have ventured from afar after hearing of the lending library on social media, said Alyssa Kollgaard, 37, who opened the library outside her home earlier this year and stocks it with season-specific films, subversive books and free candy. She said she hopes it gives people “the experience of browsing and holding things in your hand.”

Farther south, in Hollywood, two other Free Blockbusters appeared empty on a recent Sunday, and the original, outside a grocery store in Los Feliz, has been removed by the city. But the one outside Mr. Morrison’s home in the quiet neighborhood of Los Feliz was filled with DVDs, including the film “Pay it Forward,” several seasons of the series “Burn Notice” and the 2000s sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.”

Two men in their 20s noticed the box as they walked past, but said they didn’t realize it had DVDs inside it. Neither watched films on physical media anymore, they said, preferring subscription services or YouTube. “It’s just kind of like on the nostalgia factor, for sure,” Sevag Halajian, 23, said of the box, recalling how as a child, he used to visit the video store with his friends.

“It was a fun time,” he added. “This has inspired me to go back to the old ‘Tom and Jerry’ DVDs I have and watch them.”

The Return of Indie Sleaze Style

 

It's clear 00s fashion is back, Isabel Slone writes. But what are we searching for in skinny scarves and disco pants?

BY ISABEL SLONE

DAVID KRIEGER/BAUER-GRIFFIN

Just over a decade ago, the hipster reigned supreme. These paragons of coolness could easily be sussed out by their American Apparel gold lamé leggings, sideswept bangs, Richie Tenenbaum headbands, and tank tops with craterous armholes that dipped all the way to the hip bones. They listened to bloghaus, an obscure music genre that mashed up indie, disco, and rave. They read Hipster Runoff, a stream-of-consciousness site run by a mysterious pseudonymous blogger named Carles. They partied, frequently, while dancing the night away to electro-pop bands with perplexing names like New Young Pony Club and Simian Mobile Disco. The attendant debauchery immortalized forever through amateur flash photography posted online the next morning. Though a famous n+1 feature by Mark Greif, “What Was the Hipster,” declared the archetype dead in 2010, it clung on until 2012, when Macklemore released the honking anthem “Thrift Shop,” which effectively vanquished the style by Columbus-ing the ironic, novelty style that tastemakers had adhered to for at least a half-decade previous. It was as if the kitchen lights had been flicked on at 2 a.m., providing a short glimpse of cockroaches scattering to the edges of the room before they subsequently disappeared.

JEAN BAPTISTE LACROIX

Vanessa Hudgens performs on September 7, 2008 in Santa Monica, California

As it turns out, hipster style was not dead—it was merely dormant. The hipster aesthetic, now dubbed “indie sleaze,” has been tapped for a comeback. Trend cycles have sped up to such a degree that the vanguard cool kids are now idolizing a time that was barely 10 years in the past. A viral TikTok by Brooklyn-based trend forecaster Mandy Lee suggests there is an “obscene amount of evidence” that the aesthetic is coming back, citing a paparazzi photo of Bella Hadid sporting wired headphones. But the evidence extends much further than that. Margaret Qualley lounges suggestively in lace ankle socks for the latest cover of HommeGirls magazine. (Cass Blackbird, a photographer who was around for the first iteration of indie sleaze, took the photos.) Kirsten Dunst appears on the November 2021 cover of Architectural Digest wearing the mid-aughts staple of black ankle-length leggings under a bohemian-style dress. And on TikTok, users sing the praises of “vintage” American Apparel.

DAVE M. BENETT

Kate Moss attends the Spring/Summer 2005 Frost French fashion event during London Fashion Week, September 19, 2004

“Indie sleaze feels very vague but also super specific at the same time. It’s American Apparel ads, flash photography, Urban Outfitters, Ed Banger records, Nylon magazine, and Myspace,” says Ilia Espialidi, a 24-year-old video editor from Greece who is just one of a growing cohort of Gen Z obsessed with dressing like it’s 2008. “I love how random and tacky it is.”

Espialidi’s daily uniform consists of dark-wash skinny jeans, white granny socks, faux-leather loafers, and an oversized graphic tee, accessorized with pearls, cross necklaces, or bow headbands. “I enjoy [wearing] stuff that makes people skeptical at first or maybe even frown. The contradiction between being trendy and trashy is what makes this aesthetic such an iconic period in fashion for me,” she says.

MICHEL DUFOUR

Zoe Kravitz at Paris Fashion Week on October 2, 2008 in Paris, France

“It was an organic, free-spirited time of not caring, which I think people crave,” says Mark Hunter, the L.A.-based photographer whose blog, The Cobrasnake, was one of the progenitors of the look. “When you look at my photos, people look like they’re having the best time of their life. They’re not focused on the phone in their hand or posing for the camera. They’re living, basically.”

Indie sleaze is about "authentic genuine fun and freedom,” Lee echoes. The time period between 2006 and 2012 was the last on earth before it became normal to walk around carrying a tiny computer with a professional-grade camera in one’s pocket. Nobody dressed up for the express purpose of being photographed—unless they were deliberately trying to get on the Cobrasnake. The ineffable quality captured by the party photography of the era is a result of its candid nature.

ARNALDO MAGNANI

Blake Lively on location during filming of Gossip Girl on March 14, 2008 in New York City

Much of the appeal of indie sleaze is fairly straightforward and obvious. The current Y2K style revival has reached its zenith, making the 2010s the next natural destination for the nostalgia trend cycle to land. Further, its messy and chaotic countenance serves as a discernible rejection of the frictionless “millennial” aesthetic that dominated the previous decade, evinced by start-ups like Allbirds and Everlane whose utterly nondescript designs sanded down any indications of personal style into a smooth, uniform surface.

But the allure also goes much further. Indie sleaze serves as a somewhat painful reminder of the last gasp in time when it was possible to envision a future unscathed by the ravages of late capitalism. Olivia V., a 30-year-old video editor from Toronto who runs the Indie Sleaze Instagram account, remembers spending most of that era attending grungy house shows where bands played in the basement. “I saw Grimes play for $5,” she says. Today, the prospect of a sandwich, let alone a Grimes concert, for $5 seems like a ludicrous fantasy.

JEFF VESPA

Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson at The Kress on September 21, 2008 in Hollywood, California

In a sense, indie sleaze is not about a desperate urge to party with pre-pandemic abandon, but nostalgia for a world in which you could still live cheaply on basically nothing. Thanks to rising inflation and a crazy housing market, cheap rent has gone the way of Betamax or charcoal irons—a thing of the distant past. Even Macklemore’s 99-cent “leopard mink” would now cost at least $50 at the thrift shop—and that’s if it hasn’t already been marked up to $200 by an enterprising Depop seller.

The aesthetic also feels like a direct repudiation of the metaverse, which Mark Zuckerberg is hawking as the next stage of human development. If we are to believe him, the future of humanity involves sitting alone in a room wearing a giant headset and “interacting” with the world through a wholly virtual interface. According to The New York Times, “The metaverse will turn out to be one more suffocating blanket of technology, cocooning humans from each other, and from the sensory pleasures of real life.” Indie sleaze says, “Fuck that,” and leaves the house without a cellphone to see a DIY noise show in somebody’s basement. It encourages disciples to experience the world as it was before things became completely untenable, before exhaustion and hopelessness became a rote part of the human condition.

ALBERTO E. RODRIGUEZ

Zendaya at the premiere of Justin Bieber’s Never Say Never on February 8, 2011 in Los Angeles, California

Of course, there are a number of barriers in the way of widespread adoption. The ironic provocateur attitude of VICE Magazine, which fed its audience thinly veiled racism under the guise of “making a joke,” has morphed into something darker, as some former hipster dirtbags like Gavin McInnes have helped fuel the current rise of fascism. Conversely, the unguarded elitism on display simply isn’t compatible with today’s “let people enjoy things” optimism. Though I do think there’s an argument to be made for gratuitously dunking on things one dislikes, it’s an activity best kept private.

JUSTIN CAMPBELL

Santogold at Milk Studios on February 17, 2010 in New York City

The next is that the style wasn’t all that mainstream to begin with, so it’s difficult to imagine the normies of today adopting neon-purple unitards and fried peroxide hair as their preferred mode of dress. The next is an admission of the more “problematic” aspects of the culture, which shouldn’t be ignored.

Some critics suggest we should be careful of glamorizing an era when sexual predators like Terry Richardson and Dov Charney ran amok. Mia Worthington, an 18-year-old indie sleaze devotee from Tucson, says she’s heard people go as far as to denounce wearing old American Apparel clothes, because they see it as disrespectful to victims of sexual harassment.

RAY TAMARRA

Sandara Dara Park, of 2ne1, leaves a Manhattan hotel on August 21, 2012

Lee doesn’t quite buy that argument, denouncing it as a “chronically online take.” “When trends come back, it’s not like the values are the same,” she says. “Nobody thinks that people who like to wear dresses from the ’50s and ’60s suddenly want to be housewives who are abused by their husbands.” 

Instead, she hopes this revival eschews some of the more unsavory elements of the era like starvation-thin bodies, out-of-control drug use, and a seemingly never-ending zest for cultural appropriation. (Remember when people wore ceremonial headdresses to Coachella? Unfortunately, that, too, constitutes indie sleaze.) 

There’s no point in positioning indie sleaze as a more “innocent” time in history, but it does represent a pointed form of resistance against the direction the world is headed in. Renounce the metaverse in favor of shotgunning a warm, scuzzy PBR while listening to Klaxons remixes. If indie sleaze is coming back, long may it reign.

The Story Behind Bongwater: Portland's Lost Stoner Comedy Starring Luke Wilson, Jack Black and Brittany Murphy

 

We spoke to director Richard Sears about what happened to a movie that has all but disappeared.

(courtesy of Alliance Independent Films)

By Jay Horton

Bongwater never had much of a chance.

Adapted from Portland author Michael Hornburg's widely panned grunge novel of the same name, the film follows a peevish painter-slash-pot dealer and his manic pixie ex-girlfriend through a series of loosely connected events. The film flopped in 1997, and would probably be totally forgotten were it not for its cast's later accomplishments.

Yes, there's a movie starring Jack Black, Brittany Murphy, Luke Wilson, Jamie Kennedy, Alicia Witt and Andy Dick, set and filmed in Portland, that few people in the city have ever seen. And that lingering critique should ring familiar to Portlanders and potheads alike: It's a gorgeous waste of potential that goes beyond the star-studded cast.

Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh, who'd score Rushmore, handled the music. Cameraman Richard Crudo later served six terms as president of the American Society of Cinematographers. Costumer Nancy Steiner outfitted Lost in Translation and Little Miss Sunshine. Producers Laura Bickford and Alessandro Uzielli would next purchase the property that became Steven Soderbergh's Traffic and the company that supplies objets d'art for Britain's royal family, respectively.

When he took on his first feature, Richard Sears had just won Best Short Film at Cannes for An Evil Town, an adaptation of a Charles Bukowski story. But Bongwater ended up being his last feature for almost two decades. His newest feature, Bottom of the World, a thriller starring Jena Malone (The Neon Demon, Nocturnal Animals) about a young woman who disappears and her boyfriend's search for her, was released in March 2017.

"If the movie's not a success…you get put in jail a little bit," Sears laughs. "It played a couple festivals—opened at Los Angeles Film Festival, that was the big one—and got a good reception, but it was weird. People either loved this movie or they hated it, with no in-between. And, there was a lot of hate…'It's too slow! There's no plot!' To me, it was a study of a culture and a time and a place with these characters that you just hang out with. And, they're interesting, or they're not."

They were, the homegrown director says, very Portland.

The Portland lore starts with Hornburg, the book's author, who lived here during the grunge years. He wrote for The Portland Mercury before moving to New York and becoming an editor at Grove Press. He famously had a fling with Courtney Love while both lived here, and he played in an art rock band called the Usual Suspects.

Bongwater the book has a character named Courtney based on Love. The filmmakers feared legal action should their antiheroine, Serena, too closely resemble the newly ascendant actress, who'd just turned up blue in Larry Flynt's bathtub.

Meanwhile, the feel of the city and the characters was lost on a cast and crew flown up from Los Angeles for three weeks of filming.

"I knew people like David [Luke Wilson] meandered around like a lot of guys meandered their lives around—that's what drew me to him," Sears says. "The storyline wasn't really that enthralling. It's more about the characters. That's why I like Portlandia so much."

It's striking how many of Bongwater's shots of Portland use the same landmarks later made famous on television—and eerie how little the city's visual touchstones have altered.

That climactic embrace atop City Signs could've been captured last night, as could scenes outside David's residence next to the Bagdad Theater. Jack Black's band of crusty shroom hunters may well still hang out on Sauvie Island. The wholly unchanged Mary's Club, a notable presence in the novel, was Sears' first stop upon arrival and became a favorite of cast and crew both for drinks and as the setting for the film's signal moment, when David boozes while Serena sets his home ablaze.

If the locations look the same, though, arranging access was easier.

After a brief chat with Mary's manager, Sears was allowed to set up cameras and even enlist a dancer (credited as "Muffy") as an extra.

"Portland at that time was a very easy place to shoot," he says. "Everyone was very accommodating. I don't think we could have found a house to burn down anywhere else."

In fact, the Portland Fire Bureau was happy to burn down a house for him.

"The producer somehow wrangled that. It was kind of a training vehicle for their staff and just happened to be at the right time. This house in a really bad neighborhood had been condemned," he says. "Somebody had been evicted and left all this acid or lye inside, so nobody could ever go back because of chemical endangerment. We painted and did some little cosmetic fix-ups so the exterior would match where we had been shooting. It was an amazing day. Like, 'Holy shit! I can't believe they're letting us do this!' They burned that baby up, and we filmed 'em putting it out."

Members of the cast enjoyed their short Portland stays differently. Luke Wilson combed Powell's. Jack Black stalked Elliott Smith. Brittany Murphy attached her Walkman and roamed the streets of downtown. Andy Dick, however, disappeared.

"We never knew where Andy was," Sears says. "He was a fucking tornado, and very hard to corral. One night, we were at Mary's. I didn't even know he was at the bar when we hear some fight in the bathroom. Andy's in there, doing God knows what, and we had to yank him out."

Not that you can blame Dick for the film's oddities—or lack of success.

"I remember specifically, that scene with Luke and Andy having mimosas on the patio. We were getting ready to shoot, and Andy wasn't there. It's call time, the actors are getting dressed, hair and makeup setting up, and we're literally looking at the script trying to figure out a way to do this without Andy, when he rolls up. I don't think he'd slept a wink—up all night partying, doing something—and he just walks right on the set, puts on his little outfit, sits down, and…he just fucking nailed that scene." 

SEE IT: Bongwater is available to purchase on iTunes.  Bottom of the World is available to stream on Amazon Video.

How Linguists Are Using Urban Dictionary

Urban Dictionary continues a long history of recording low-brow language. It’s also a repository of a specific kind of internet immaturity.

Manz /manz/ noun. 1: Friend, Buddy, Associate... somebody you are close to. 2: Part man and part zebra.

 

Illustration: Jonathan Aprea/Pixabay

By: Christine Ro

Urban Dictionary, as you may know, is a crowdsourced website where anyone can suggest a new word—or a new definition of a word—years before establishment lexicographers catch on. It was founded in 1999 by computer science student Aaron Peckham to make fun of the comparatively staid Dictionary.com. Yet Urban Dictionary has become much more than a parody site, drawing approximately 65 million visitors every month.

Of course, Urban Dictionary is also a repository of adolescent grossout humor, often humor about sexual practices that are the stuff of urban legends (uh, penis McFlurry?). This isn’t just a matter of trifling but ultimately harmless terms. Bigoted words and definitions have thrived on the site, but Peckham believes that offensive words should be left intact. It’s clear from a quick browse through the trending terms that the users are particularly titillated by (or nervous about) women’s bodies (e.g., twatopotamus) and sex between men (e.g., vaginal intolerant).

“IBM experimented with adding Urban Dictionary data to its artificial intelligence system Watson, only to scrub it all out again when the computer started swearing at them.”

With its crowdsourced definitions and high speed of coinage, Urban Dictionary is very much a product of the internet age. But it also continues a long history of recording low-brow language: dictionaries of English slang have been around in some form for centuries. The slang dictionaries of the seventeenth century were considered useful for clueing readers into the language of thieves and cheats, which itself was part of an older tradition of exoticizing the language of the poor and criminal. By 1785, Francis Grose’s Classic Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue extended the slang lexicon beyond the middle-class conception, adding terms such as bum fodder (for toilet paper).

Urban Dictionary carries this legacy forward, and the site is likely to persist in some form. The Library of Congress now archives it. Its pages were saved to the Internet Archive more than 12,500 times between May 25, 2002, and October 4, 2019, with a steady increase over time. And according to internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch’s much-touted new book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language: “IBM experimented with adding Urban Dictionary data to its artificial intelligence system Watson, only to scrub it all out again when the computer started swearing at them.”

The stakes are increasing as well. Urban Dictionary is being used to determine the acceptability of vanity plate names in some U.S. states. More serious is the continued tradition of dictionary use in legal cases, where the interpretation of a single word can have grave consequences. Urban Dictionary’s definition of to nut, for instance, has been brought up in a sexual harassment claim, and the meanings of jack were debated in a financial restitution case. While Urban Dictionary’s speed may be useful in a legal setting, some lexicologists believe that depending on a crowdsourced dictionary is risky.

Linguists Open the Urban Dictionary

Whatever we might think of its vulgarity, Urban Dictionary is useful. It allows researchers to track terms that are too recent or too niche to appear in establishment dictionaries, and to determine how people are using English online.

For example, one 2006 paper by communication expert Jean E. Fox Tree uses Urban Dictionary, along with other examples of “public dictionary websites” (like Wikipedia and Answers.com), to excavate the uses of like in storytelling. And Urban Dictionary is regularly cited as a source in linguistics research, such as a 2015 paper by Natasha Shrikant on Indian American students.

McCulloch finds Urban Dictionary useful for mapping chronology, due to the datestamps attached to definitions, especially for the period in the early 2000s, before social media sites became behemoths.

Derek Denis, a linguistics researcher at the University of Toronto, agrees that the datestamp function is useful. The other key aspect, he points out, is the use of Urban Dictionary to unearth indexical meanings, or the social meanings of words. For him, the first example that comes to mind is the interjection eh. Urban Dictionary, unlike more formal dictionaries, mentions the Canadian association early and often.

In Denis’ research into Toronto’s multiethnic slang, he’s used Urban Dictionary to find the earliest documented use of terms like mans/manz, meaning “I.” The wide-ranging, youth-oriented website might seem especially well-suited for recording this kind of multiethnolect: a dialect that draws from multiple ethnic groups, typically spoken by young people, and often stigmatized or dismissed. An example is Multicultural London English, sometimes oversimplified as “Jafaican,” for “fake Jamaican.” But Denis believes that Urban Dictionary’s applicability is broader: “It’s generally useful for not just young people and multiethnic areas but general for any speech community,” he says.

Not Exactly the Wild West

A 2010 paper by the linguist Lauren Squires suggests that, despite Urban Dictionary’s anarchic reputation, it can reproduce the idea of a division between proper and improper language, with internet language being deemed socially unacceptable. Squires gives the examples of chatspeak, defined by one user as “[a] disgrace to the English language,” and netspeak, called “[a]n easy way to determine the IQ of the person you are talking to over the Internet.”

In other words, some Urban Dictionary contributors appear to be conservatively guarding a notion of a pure (print) version of English, even though language purists consider the site itself to be a key source of corruption. But maybe this isn’t as paradoxical as it seems. It may be that the site has become a linguistic sewer because certain users feel emboldened by the format, allowing them to use (or coin) terms they wouldn’t in a more formal setting.

Urban Dictionary’s bias toward obnoxiousness might make it less a repository of slang and more a collection of a specific kind of internet immaturity. As McCulloch writes in Because Internet: “There seems to be a correlation between how genuinely popular a word is and how much Urban Dictionary’s definition writers despise it and the people who use it.”

An alternative Urban Dictionary definition of manz, “part man and part zebra,” might stem only from the cackling imagination of a single user.

Are its contributors just pranking would-be scholars attempting to use the site for anything other than gleeful entertainment? Well, surely some are trying to. An alternative Urban Dictionary definition of manz, “part man and part zebra,” might stem only from the cackling imagination of a single user. Researchers may need to tread carefully, particularly given that young men are overrepresented on the site.

But linguists like Denis aren’t too concerned. The premise of Urban Dictionary is that a term, however jokey or quirky, doesn’t need to be popular to be worthy of recording. In Denis’ view, it just needs to be understood by at least two people. He says that “it’s probably not completely idiosyncratic. It’s probably not just limited to that one person, but rather, it might just be that person and like two or three friends. But the important thing there is that those few people—
maybe it’s two people—still form a speech community.”

In fact, the lack of restrictions, a style guide, or a core arbiter in Urban Dictionary means that “things can come out more explicitly” compared to conventional dictionaries, Denis believes. “I think the Urban Dictionary model is probably more representative because it doesn’t rely on that authority.”

It’s been argued that the now 20-year-old Urban Dictionary has become something of a fogey itself (if internet years are like dog years, the website is ancient). Newer websites and social media platforms may be even more responsive to language trends, possibly leaving Urban Dictionary in a middle ground: not as immediate as Twitter, not as specific as Know Your Meme, not as respected as Merriam-Webster, not as credible as Wikipedia, and not as popular as Reddit. But for now, linguists are digging through Urban Dictionary to track, date, and analyze language, no matter how niche or nasty, as it’s actually used.