If Aliens abduct me and ask me to give them one book, I’d choose the Urban Dictionary.
Before my reasons, here are some of my favorite definitions:
Awesome: Something Americans use to describe everything.
Funny: When someone else gets hurt.
Harvard: A well-known mental health facility located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Harvard — Where only 10% of residents seriously consider suicide every year!)
Filibuster：
(1) To reject someone’s friend request or group invite on Facebook by just leaving it there, preventing the sender from sending a new request.
(2) To talk constantly until a female has no choice but to give you a blow job in an effort to shut you up. Proven effective on several occasions.
……
Note: Filibuster is a goldmine that you definitely should explore by yourself. But be warned that it’s not PG.
Why Urban Dictionary?
- UD is what all institutions strive to be, democratically meritorious. It’ll show Aliens what we can collectively achieve. Rather than the typical corruption by big money, big pharma, big tech, big ego,
- UD’s so wonderful because it’s only motivated by the pure spirit of fun and love. Since fun does not cannot lie, UD is true like our conscience is true. Shiningly antifragile.
- Definitions and Comedy are respectively the most intellectually and culturally sophisticated activities we engage in. All thought is just finding the right definition for a thing, and all life, finding the joy out of the living. UD, by uniting the two, is like the Kantian schema which mediates concept and intuition, showing how our humanity lies in moving between and playing with layers of abstraction upon the most concrete metaphors (c.f. sub-stance, ob-ject, consumers, and even “In the beginning was the word”).
- Not only does UD display the aforementioned mediatory playfulness, UD’s best definitions, which is never textbook style straightforward (only privileged-cum-boring-Ivy-League-students-trying-too-hard write those), but a line that comes out of nowhere, connecting things in the weirdest ways, and knocks you off your seat in its ingenuity (see filibuster), shows the strangest, funkiest, and most interesting ways culture connects the most disconnected elements in consonant ways. Thus and thus, UD perfectly introduces the intricacies of Bildung to an alien.
- UD even, to bring in some theory, perfectly illustrates how homo sapiens immanently transcend the world through the objet petit a—that indivisible remainder in a thing that is more Real than the thing’s reality—like the part (or the non-part) of a person that we love which we, for the failure (or triumph) of conceptual thought, can only call “the soul,” which parallels the peculiar way a good UD definition hedges the definition, almost parsimoniously, to 1 situation, rather than giving a standard general def., replete with (n.), (adj.), and all that, whilst managing to achieve much more than general official boring definitions can ever achieve.
Urban Dictionary won’t tell Aliens much about what we know or what we have, but it’ll show them who we are. A strange, playful species who loves to have fun, and who, by virtue of its playfulness, creates the most striking thought-products in democratic joy.
Urban Dictionary may not be able to tell Aliens, but it can tell us, co-creators of this great work of art, how difficult it is to speak the truth and all the most unlikeliest places that truth manifests itself. It most clearly teaches this to us when we try ourselves to contribute to it, when we find out how almost everything we write sound horribly cliche and distasteful, and how cumgutteringly hard it really is to speak, refreshingly, for once, the truth (the same difficulty we encounter when writing our Instagram bios or strange Harvard Discord Server personal introductions). Like all great works of art, UD pushes us to pay attention to the ordinary by illuminating its extraordinariness, allowing us to discover beauty and joy of truth. UD is the truth, the way, and the life—a true education in selfhood, and an unparalleled one at that.
Warren's Brain Dumps 